Archive for April, 2011

Europe’s Rising Islamophobia

Paul Hockenos | Source

Berlin — With inspiring scenes of the Arab Spring on television for months, one might have expected images of democratic revolutions to punch a hole in the crude anti-Muslim stereotypes of Europe’s Islamophobes, those politicians and intellectuals who swear that Islam is totalitarian to its core. And if this alone didn’t dispel clichés of a monolithic, violent religion, then surely the vox pop of diaspora Egyptians, Tunisians and others on the nightly news — university students, women who head NGOs and children alongside their native French or German peers — would have demonstrated the diversity and integration of Muslim Europeans, something study after study documents.

To the contrary, in recent elections Islamophobes like France’s right-wing National Front and the anti-EU True Finn Party racked up their best numbers ever, the latest strides in a surging movement that is recasting the political landscape of Western Europe. These elements have every reason to thank mainstream politicians, who, in the hope of exploiting the phenomenon for their own gain, have paved the way for the far right. In April, for example, France’s ridiculous “burqa ban” went into effect with overwhelming popular support, while EU leaders pushed the panic button over Tunisian refugees landing in Italy and Malta, turning the image of peaceful revolutionaries across the Mediterranean into one of an impoverished mob besieging Fortress Europe.

What makes anti-Muslim racism so lethal is that unlike populisms of the past, Islamophobia has broad appeal across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right and irrespective of class or educational level. Where it manifests itself in electoral parties, such as in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and now even Sweden and Finland, its advocates fare much better than old-school far-right parties ever did, with their vulgar anti-Semitism and expansionist fantasies. There is nevertheless plenty of overlap with the extreme right, which inscribes anti-Islam thinking prominently in its manifestos and is thriving on the new discourse; never before have so many of its representatives been so close to the levers of power in so many Western European countries.

Islamophobia is solidly mainstream; there is no politically correct taboo against it, as there is with overt racism or other strains of xenophobia. In fact, some of Europe’s highest-profile Islamophobes justify their attacks on Islam and Europe’s Muslims in the name of women’s and gay rights. Conservative, liberal and even leftist parties tap into it, partly out of opportunism and partly out of conviction. Invoking secularism and Enlightenment values, some centrists and leftists propagate a cultural racism that instead of using skin color imputes immutable characteristics to cultures and assigns them a hierarchy, with Western civilization at the top. This is Islamophobia, which functions just as racism does, and serves the purposes of those who have long sought to stem immigration, keep Turkey out of the European Union and secure a white Christian Europe.

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Not every European country has anti-Muslim parties as successful as two of Islamophobia’s poster boys, the Dutch Freedom Party and the Danish People’s Party, both of which put the clash of cultures and the Islamic menace at the center of their programs. Yet these cases are instructive, because they represent a new generation of the European right, and the conditions of their rise exist across Western Europe. Surveys and opinion polls, for example, indicate that anti-Muslim sentiment in Holland and Denmark is about the same as in most other Western European countries. In one recent study, between 34 and 37 percent of French, Dutch, Portuguese and Danes say they have a negative opinion of Muslims. In Germany the figure is 59 percent.

The Dutch Freedom Party is a one-man outfit led by 47-year-old Geert Wilders, immediately recognizable by his wavy mane of platinum-blond hair. Since October the party has been an unofficial partner in the center-right governing coalition (it has no cabinet seats, but it can dictate terms to a minority government that ultimately needs its votes). In the Netherlands, previously renowned for its tolerance, Wilders’s party more than doubled its numbers last year, to 16 percent of the electorate, on a platform to stop the “Islamization of the Netherlands.” The party pledged to halt immigration from “Muslim countries,” to tax women wearing headscarves and to ban the Koran as well as the construction of mosques. Wilders blames the easygoing model of Dutch multiculturalism for exposing the Netherlands to Islam, and thus for undermining the very tolerance it naïvely extended to Muslim peoples. Over the past two years he has consistently polled as one of the country’s most popular politicians, despite being put on trial on charges of inciting hatred against Muslims (the case is ongoing).

As for the Danish People’s Party, it has worked hand-in-hand with the country’s center-right government since 2001. The party — one leading MP likens the hijab to the swastika — took 15 percent of the vote in the 2009 European Parliament elections and is now Denmark’s third-biggest party. Its guiding light, Pia Kjaersgaard, originally belonged to one of Denmark’s establishment parties, as Wilders did in the Netherlands. Unlike the old right, with its blood-and-soil chauvinism and anti-Semitism, new rightists like Kjaersgaard couch their nationalism as a defense of Western civilization and even “Judeo-Christian values.” One of her quotes: “Not in their wildest imagination would anyone [in 1900] have imagined that large parts of Copenhagen and other Danish towns would be populated by people who are at a lower stage of civilization, with their own primitive and cruel customs like honor killings, forced marriages, halal slaughtering, and blood-feuds. This is exactly what is happening now…. [They] have come to a Denmark that left the dark ages hundreds of years ago.”

In both countries the governments have caved in to Islamophobes by dramatically tightening immigration requirements for non-Westerners. The once proudly open-minded Denmark now has the strictest such laws in Europe. “I’m certain that soon many other countries will copy us,” boasted the People’s Party after the November passage of a law it co-wrote. The opposition Social Democrats, though fiercely split on the issue, ended up backing the bill as well. Their rationale: to stop forced marriages and protect ethnic minority women from family pressure, as if immigration restrictions would accomplish either. All such talk from centrist parties does is perpetuate prejudices: in this case, that forced marriage is the rule in Muslim European families, which is simply not true.

The Netherlands and Denmark, like most of Western Europe, have significant numbers of foreign-born immigrants and second-generation inhabitants from Arabic or majority-Muslim countries. (Many have Turkish backgrounds and — as with many Bosnians, Moroccans and Iraqis — may or may not practice Islam. But thanks to the new discourse, which conflates ethnicity with religion, they’re all called Muslims.) These communities make up 5 and 4 percent of their populations, respectively (3.2 percent is the European Union average), and have a positive birthrate, in contrast with sagging demographics across almost all of traditionally Christian Europe, a trend that has Islamophobes sounding the alarm bells. It is also the case — though the root causes are hotly disputed — that segments of these minorities are poorly integrated, unemployment among them is higher than the national average and 1 to 2 percent hold radical views.

Even in EU countries that don’t have growing anti-Muslim parties, Islamophobic sentiment is potent. In Germany, for example, one survey after another attests to widening hostility directed at the Muslim population and Islam in general. One recent study showed 58 percent of Germans in favor of restricting religious freedom for Muslims. This included more than 75 percent of those in eastern Germany, where the Muslim population is negligible. Thirty-seven percent of Germans feel the Federal Republic would be better off “without Islam.” The surveys underscore the steady rise of these sentiments since 2004, with a significant jump from 2009 to 2010. They also show that while attitudes are particularly strong in traditional right-wing milieus, they have also become more pronounced in the middle and upper classes and among Germans with higher education. They also reveal that anti-Muslim feelings are far stronger than homophobia, classic racism, sexism or anti-Semitism — the latter long the measure for illiberal thinking in Germany.

This mainstreaming of Islamophobia would have been inconceivable without the post-9/11 anti-Muslim discourse in European media; Islamophobic websites like Germany’s Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa and Politically Incorrect have tens of thousands of visitors a day. In large part the trail was blazed by intellectuals, a surprising number of whom had roots in progressive politics. Hugely influential was the late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, whose bestselling books insisted that Islam is a thoroughly violent and totalitarian creed striving for world domination. The former antifascist partisan and left-wing journalist once likened the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Others include French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Levy (“the veil is an invitation to rape”), British novelist and former New Statesman editor Martin Amis, Dutch intellectual and Labor Party member Paul Scheffer, and in Germany such figures as Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer and Henryk Broder, all leftists or former leftists of one stripe or another. Schwarzer, for example, is the mother of Germany’s feminist movement, and with her flagship quarterly EMMA she has fought for women’s liberation since the early 1970s. She denounces Islam as misogynistic and misanthropic, accusing it — and those who defend it — of betraying the universality of human rights. For her, and for many other critics of Islam, “tolerating” the religion means tolerating forced marriages, honor killings, burqas, female genital mutilation and polygamy. Schwarzer now argues for measures that conservatives and the far right have pursued for decades. In the past it was coalitions comprising liberal intellectuals, feminists and Christian churches that waged fierce opposition to such legislation.

Where the new right parties aren’t surging, centrist politicians take on much of the anti-Muslim baggage. It wasn’t, for example, right-wingers who passed the burqa bans in France and Belgium but liberal and mainstream conservative parties, backed by the left. In France, some Socialists and Communists joined President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling party in voting for the recent ban of the full veil in public, a law proposed by a Communist mayor from southern France (the Greens abstained, fearful of the repercussions of a no vote). Polls showed 80 percent of French voters in favor of the ban.

In contrast to the conservative parties’ thinly veiled racism, the left’s anti-Muslim reaction is an anticlerical stance, a kind of dogmatic secularism that sees religion as nothing more than the opiate of the masses. Its inability to grasp that Islam is a source of identity for many European Muslims and, more important, to debunk racist Islamophobia plays straight into the hands of political foes, including the churches (which come off as benevolent compared withen vogue caricatures of Islam). By branding Islam as something qualitatively different from and much more dangerous than other religions, the left helps to stigmatize it further — and lets Christianity off the hook.

As John Mullen of France’s radical left-wing Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste explains, “The majority of the left in France believe that the hijab is an assault on women’s rights. This position quickly moves into the prejudice that Muslim women in France are more oppressed than non-Muslim women, that the experience of women in, say, Saudi Arabia is merely an extreme case of an oppression which is inherent in Islam.” He and other NPA activists protested the party’s reluctance to allow Ilham Moussaïd, a secular, French-born, prochoice feminist, to run as a candidate because she wears a headscarf. Twelve eventually quit. Says Mullen: “Muslim and Arab men are then presented as the major source of women’s oppression and contrasted with the progressive white values of Republican France. So opposition to religious practices on the basis of progressive values can easily turn into a thinly disguised form of racism.”

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In Germany the issue burst into the political sphere only last year, with the publication ofDeutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany Does Away With Itself”), by Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, an economist on the board of Germany’s Central Bank and a former Berlin councilman. In it he argues that Muslims are “unwilling” and “unable” to integrate; that Muslim immigrants sponge off the welfare systems; that because of their higher birthrate they will soon outnumber indigenous Germans; and that immigration (from the wrong parts of the world) undermines Germany’s “cultural identity” and “national character.” He writes, “I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin.” Unlike much of the cultural anti-Muslim sentiment in the media, Sarrazin’s book explicitly mixes race into the blend, arguing that “Muslim genes” are somehow inferior to German ones.

Though Sarrazin’s book certainly wasn’t the first anti-Muslim tract published in Germany, it was the first by a mainstream politician. It unexpectedly surged to the top of the bestseller list, where it remains today. While controversy over the book forced him to leave the Central Bank, it made the sullen, gray-haired economist Germany’s favorite talk-show guest and a multimillionaire. Fortunately, Sarrazin is not a movement leader and has no ambition to start his own party. An explicitly anti-Muslim right-wing movement, Pro Deutschland, has emerged recently, but it has yet to kindle broad-based enthusiasm, perhaps because the established parties are soaking up its potential.

The Sarrazin affair illustrated just how deep-seated Islamophobia has become in Germany. At first, the country’s leading politicians responded by roundly condemning the author. But once polls emerged showing that every party’s constituency believed that Sarrazin “gets some things right,” many critics backed off. The Social Democrats balked at expelling him (an investigation is under way), and party members as esteemed as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, one of the fathers of the Federal Republic, praised Sarrazin’s candor. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat, said “the multiculturalism experiment” has “failed,” and the leader of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union said it was high time to stop immigration from alien cultures. Although Germany’s Left Party condemned the Sarrazin theses, one poll showed that 29 percent of the party’s voters would be sympathetic to a Sarrazin-led party, the highest result of all the parties (Left Party voters are overwhelmingly eastern German, secular and consider themselves socialists).

Critically, Germany’s political elite is divided over the issues posed by Islam and Muslims. Almost every party — with the exception of the Greens, whose members poll lowest for Islamophobia — has prominent representatives who are hostile to Islam as well as those who speak out for tolerance. For example, Germany’s president, Christian Democrat Christian Wulff, underscored in a major address this year that “Islam now too is part of Germany,” an enormous step forward in making the country’s 4 million Muslims feel at home. And Merkel has made great strides in modernizing the Christian Democrats, including the initiation of the Islam Conference, a forum for dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. But conservatives have long fought for tighter immigration laws and still defend the idea of a Christian Europe, for example in their adamant opposition to Turkish EU membership. For some, anti-Muslim sentiment is a perfect way to dress up bigotry in liberal clothing. Now conservatives call for limiting immigration because of Islam’s antipathy to gay rights and feminism — which they now claim to support, in contrast with backward Muslims! Islamophobia is an enormous boon to these forces, supplying them with an ostensibly politically correct rationale for their goals as well as access to previously unreachable voters.

Although Islamophobia is gaining ground at a disturbing clip, there are voices of reason among the political elites and civil society. They rightly emphasize that there is no monolithic Islam as such — it is preposterous, for example, to throw Iran-born political refugees with university degrees into the same pot as 1960s-era Anatolian guest workers, even though both are “Muslim.” And reducing all of Islam to its most radical factions only serves demagogues and obstructs integration. They point out that Islam is remarkably heterogeneous and dynamic, and includes an emergent European Islam that blends religion with modernity. Moreover, Europe’s integration of immigrants is actually far more successful than critics portray it, with their images of “parallel societies” and sinister ghettos.

A number of recent studies in Germany unequivocally refute anti-Islam clichés. They show, for example, that the vast majority of Muslims don’t see Islam as a political ideology and don’t define themselves foremost through religion but through social standing, regional origin and profession. Only about 7 percent are deeply religious and adhere to patriarchal traditions; these tend to live in ethnic enclaves, unlike their co-religionists. In Germany 98 percent of Muslims choose their own partners. Eighty-four percent believe in separation of church and state. The new studies corroborate other research showing that most of Europe’s 53 million Muslims (16 million in the EU) have lifestyles and concerns a lot like those of non-Muslim Europeans. The birthrate of successive generations of “German Turks,” for example, is approaching that of other Germans. Muslim groups have welcomed initiatives, like Germany’s Islam Conference, to bring Islam and European Muslims into the mainstream, as well as other positive steps to overcome the discrimination that, in part, accounts for European Muslims’ marginalization and lands many of them at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Europe’s left in particular should be in a better position to critique Islamophobic discourse. This means a rethinking of knee-jerk laicism in light of new phenomena such as the desire of many women from Muslim backgrounds to wear a headscarf for reasons of ethnic or religious pride. Or, if the left is to insist on radical secularism, then it should apply the same critique to all religions. Why, for example, is Islam to blame when ethnic Turkish kids perform poorly in German schools, but not Catholicism when Italian migrants flunk out (which they do, in higher numbers than kids with Turkish backgrounds)? In the same vein, the rationale for exceptional behavior such as honor killings should be sought in the patriarchal traditions of certain countries rather than in Islam itself. Cultural racism, which legitimizes right-wing goals, is a complex phenomenon to decode, but it is the task of progressive forces to do it.

Policies like Switzerland’s ban on minaret construction (approved by 58 percent of voters in 2009) and veil prohibitions in France, Belgium and parts of Germany violate basic rights. Increasingly derogatory popular attitudes toward Islam and Muslims translate into workplace and schoolyard discrimination, which only increases tensions. Moreover, the mainstreaming of bigotry has created a new right and revived the old one: Austria’s Freedom Party, the Flemish Vlaams Blok and France’s National Front have renewed their fortunes by adopting Islamophobia. In last fall’s Vienna elections, the Jörg Haider-less Freedom Party nearly doubled its 2005 result, capturing 27 percent of the vote. Polls actually show the National Front’s new leader, Marine Le Pen, running ahead of Sarkozy for the 2012 presidential vote.

Of all the specters haunting Europe, none are as potent — or potentially disruptive to democracy — as Islamophobia. Though the economic crisis and budget slashing across the continent have certainly fueled anti-Muslim discourse, they are not chiefly to blame for Islamophobia. The goals and jingoistic assumptions at the core of the right’s agenda are essentially unchanged from the 1980s. The difference is that the left and liberals have largely capitulated, unable to address the issue of Islam and the Muslims among us in a constructive way.

Paul Hockenos, a writer based in Berlin, is the author of Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe.

What Is Sharia?

Source
by Maya Mikdashi

This question has animated scholarly, religious, and political debates for centuries. These debates have been lively, at times contentious, and have been held (under different circumstances and leading to different results) in different parts of the Muslim majority world as well as in parts of the world with few, if any, Muslims. More recently, it seems that the question “What is sharia?” has become a pressing concern in Western countries with growing Muslim minorities who continue to be unevenly incorporated into the imagined image of the “French”, “Swedish”, “German”, or “American” citizen. Central to this uneven incorporation (and at times, explicit discrimination) is the anxiety produced by the supposed relationship between all Muslims, everywhere, and this “universal law” which is said to be incompatible with Western liberal ideals such as women’s rights, gender equality, private property, freedom of speech, the freedom of choice. In addition, sharia is said to be incompatible with what are deemed “civilized” modes of punishment. In the United States today, sharia has become a well known for connoting the word “bad.” National politicians rail on national television broadcasts about the “dangers of sharia”, op-eds are written in well-respected newspapers explaining why sharia is un-American, and wars have been legitimated in part through describing the abuses of sharia. In fact, the images associated with the word sharia demonstrate an understanding that Islamic law is inherently and indigestibly different due to its illiberal and oppressive cosmology. The evidence marshaled to prove this “oppressive” nature of the sharia inevitably centers around the treatment of women and of female bodies within “Islamic Law.” Thus, a google image search of the word “sharia” spits out an assault of pictures of women with burned faces, women behind the bars of a burqa, women being decapitated by bearded men, women being buried and stoned, and images of women (and children, the second most popular category) exposed to all kinds of corporeal violence. These images speak their definitions of sharia; sharia is immoral. Sharia is scary. Sharia is barbaric.

[Has Your State Banned Sharia? Image by Mother Jones]

I am skeptical that when US lawmakers try to “ban” sharia in the United States they know, or care about the intricacies of how different practices of sharia have been formed through the intertwined histories of religions, cultures, economies, and state formations. I don’t think that when potential candidate for the US presidency Herman Cain states that “there is this attempt to gradually ease sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government” he cares that, to anyone who takes the 15 minutes to read wikipedia’s entry on “sharia,” his statement is nonsensical. Denouncing sharia, in this context, has less to do with the sharia itself than it does with domestic politics in the United States and the upcoming US Presidential elections. The fact is that there is no single definition or practice of the word “sharia.” The impossibility of a unified and universal definition is due to many factors, perhaps the most important being that there is no unified and universal practice of Islam, the religion from within which sharia is said to derive. Moreover, like Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism, Islam is not a transhistorical category of practice. That is, the ways people interpret and practice Islam has changed, and will continue to change within shifting economic, political, and social terrains. Because the histories, languages, cultures and traditions of Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and China differ, Muslim religious practices in the states within those regions also differ¹. Keeping the trend of willfully ignoring even the most basic facts about Islam, when another potential US presidential candidate, Rick Sanatorum, states that “sharia law is incompatible with American jurisprudence and our Constitution,” I do not think that he is troubled by the vacuity of his words. These politicians’ discussion of sharia has more to do do with American politics, muscular nationalism post 9-11, and the ongoing War on Terror than it does with Islamic law. The United States invaded Afghanistan in part because (the administration said) it was liberating Afghani women from the abuses of sharia. And yet, Saudi Arabia, America’s closest Arab ally, is not only a country where women cannot drive, must wear the chador, cannot travel alone, and are segregated from most aspects of public life, but is the country that is directly implicated in the Taliban’s rule in the name of Islamic law. Even more striking, Saudi Arabia is the country of citizenship of most of the 9-11 bombers, of whom none were Afghani. Despite these facts, Saudi Arabia is never cited as a country whose people need to be rescued by the United States from the ravages of Sharia. So clearly, sharia is compatible enough with American values to allow for a “special relationship” to develop between the United States and Saudi Arabia.1

[US Presidents and Saudi Kings Not Discussing Sharia]

In Lebanon, where I have conducted the majority of my research, sharia is synonymous with personal status law. In this country, often considered one of the most secular Arab states, there are three different laws applied in the different personal status courts for Shia, Sunni, and Druze Muslims. These personal status courts have jurisdiction over marriage, divorce, separation, custody, inheritance, and other matters considered integral to kinship. In matters such as custody and divorce, these Muslim sharia courts (the way they refer to themselves) must “share” jurisdiction with civil courts such as that for the protection of minors and criminal courts that hear claims of spousal abuse, and they must adhere to the code of legal conduct set forth by the state. Thus, there is supposed to be a representative of the attorney general in every Muslim personal status court in Lebanon, and their opinions must be solicited in rulings dealing with divorce. Comparatively, there is no mechanism of state oversight within the Christian personal status courts operating Lebanon, which are much less regulated and operate with much less constraint than their Muslim counterparts. The judges presiding in personal status courts (of all recognized religious sects) are religiously trained; that is, they are not graduates of a government institution, as they are in other neighboring states such as Jordan, where the judges presiding in personal status courts adjudicate a law that was put into effect, and thus can be amended, by the government. Here, as in Iran and unlike in Lebanon, a sharia judge is a graduate of the judges’ college, a civil institution. All three of these states (Iran, Jordan, Lebanon) have a different practice of sharia than Saudi Arabia, which (falsely) claims to not have a hybrid legal (civil and religious) system and instead claims that “sharia is the law of the land”. To highlight these differences in tangible terms, Lebanese Sunni personal status courts adjudicate an Ottoman era law that is a page and a half long (and defers to the jurisprudence of Abu Hanifa on issues not covered in this page and a half), while in Jordan sharia courts (which are only Sunni Courts) adjudicate a thick, long, and dense law passed by the Jordanian government and overhauled most recently in 2010. In Saudi Arabia, courts adjudicate the jurisprudence of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (a Sunni jurisprudent), and there is no published and/or legislated “code” that judges (and lawyers) are obliged to follow. Undoubtedly, the Al-Saud’s ceaseless proselytizing of the most draconian interpretation of “sharia” has played a role in the idea that the real sharia is this one rigid thing. But the impossibility of a “one size fits all shari`a” is just as much due to the different histories of Islam as to the different histories of the nation state. What sharia “means” and how it is “practiced” in the context of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon or Jordan owes just as much, if not more, to the particular histories of those nation states than to some universalist notion of Islam. In fact, even within these states there are different understandings of sharia. Thus, state practices of sharia are often different from the sharia advocated by opposition Islamist groups.

[Fear of a Muslim Planet. Image From Unknown Archive]

Furthermore, one of the fears of sharia touted in the United States is the fact that Islam is an essentially proselytizing religion. And yet, many times I have transited through American airports and stood in awe of bands of eager and bright-eyed teenagers wearing wooden crosses and toting bags destined to some African country. These teenagers move with confidence through airport security, on their way overseas to spread their version of a Christian moral universe. So clearly, proselytizing itself is also not an issue in the US. However, if American airports suddenly witnessed bands of Muslim teenagers with fervent looks, hijabs, skullcaps and Korans on their way to foreign countries I am sure that they would meet scrutiny not only from security officers, but from their fellow passengers and flight officers. One should ask; If Muslim proselytizers threaten our secular paradise, why do Christian proselytizers not threaten our secular paradise? Similarly, Canon law (of both Orthodox and Catholic varieties), in practice in Lebanon as well as many other countries, has just as many aspects to it that are discriminatory towards women as any form of sharia does. But I have never heard a public speech as to the uncivilized and unAmerican nature of Canon law. Is banning the use of contraceptives, abortions, and divorce also not antithetical to the American women’s rights movement? One could go through a list of examples that demonstrate how the word “sharia” occupies a special place in the political and social imagining of the United States. The word seems to index, to put it perhaps too simply, danger. Public Koran-burning parties, a vitriolic campaign to stop the building of a interfaith center near ground zero, and the introduction of legislation to “ban sharia” in 15 out of the 50 states that make up these United States must be understood within a lexicon of the War on Terror, of racialized and indigestible difference, and of xenophobia.

So what is sharia? It is, in its most bland definition, the moral cosmology that is meant to saturate and legislate shared life in Muslim communities. In the Lebanese state, the sharia is the muslim personal status laws, in Iran it is the spirit and much of the content of the legal system, in Saudi Arabia it is what the state says it is, and in the minds of many Islamists throughout the world, it is the utopia that their struggle promises. It is a word that is cited by a Yemeni President to try to prop up his teetering regime, a word that was cited by an American President in order to foster support for a foreign invasion, and a word has been cited in Egypt and in Afghanistan to both promote and prohibit educating women. It is a word that conjures up, in the minds of some, promises of justice, gender equity, and social harmony. In the minds of others, it conjures up images of bearded men flogging adulterous women, hanging homosexuals, and marrying children. For some, it is the law of God, for others it is the law of man trying to live within God’s imperatives. For many, it is a body of jurisprudence that can be studied, appreciated and critiqued. It is many things in theory, and still more in practice. But unfortunately, today in the United States, sharia is little more than a scare tactic.

1. In fact, despite the fact that most people seem to believe that “Islam” and “Arab” are married terms, only 15 percent of the world’s Muslims are Arab. There are more Muslims in Ethiopia than there are in Saudi Arabia, as many Muslims in China as there are in Yemen, and more Muslims living in the Indian subcontinent than there are Arabs in the world, period.

Meet the White Supremacist Leading the GOP’s Anti-Sharia Crusade

— By Tim Murphy

Last week, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make “material support” for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal marks a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, critics say even seemingly benign activities like re-painting the exterior of a mosque or bringing food to a potluck could be classified as a felony
The Tennessee bill, SB 1028, didn’t come out of nowhere. Though it’s the first of its kind, the bill is part of a wave of related measures that would ban state courts from enforcing Sharia law. (A court might refer to Sharia law in child custody or prisoner rights cases.) Since early 2010, such legislation has been considered in at least 15 states. And while fears of an impending caliphate are myriad on the far-right, the surge of legislation across the country is largely due to the work of one man: David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based white supremacist who has previously called for a “war against Islam” and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith. Yerushalmi, a lawyer, is the founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), which has been called a “hate group” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). His draft legislation served as the foundation for the Tennessee bill, and at least half a dozen other anti-Islam measures—including two bills that were signed into law last year in Louisiana and Tennessee.

With the exception of SB 1028, much of Yerushalmi’s legislation sounds pretty innocuous: State courts are prohibited from considering any foreign law that doesn’t fully honor the rights enshrined in the US and state constitutions. Because a Taliban-style interpretation of Islamic law is unheard of in the United States, the law’s impact is non-existent at best. But critics of some of the proposed bills have argued they could have far-reaching and unintended consequences, like undoing anti-kidnapping statutes, and hindering the ability of local companies to enter into contracts overseas.
But Tennessee’s SB 1028 goes much further, defining traditional Islamic law as counter to constitutional principles, and authorizing the state’s attorney general to freeze the assets of organizations that have been determined to be promoting or supporting Sharia. On Monday, CAIR and the ACLU called for lawmakers to defeat the bill.
“Essentially the bill is trying to separate the ‘good Muslims’ from the ‘bad Muslims,'” said CAIR staff attorney Gadeir Abbas in an interview with Mother Jones. “Out of all the bills that have been introduced, this is by far the most extreme.”
Reports about the rise of the anti-Sharia movement have typically focused on Oklahoma’s voter-approved constitutional amendment, which explicitly prohibited state courts from considering Islamic law (a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the amendment in December). But the movement began much earlier, with a sample bill Yerushalmi drafted at the behest of the American Public Policy Alliance, a right-wing organization established with the goal of protecting American citizens from “the infiltration and incursion of foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines, especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

In a 40-minute PowerPoint that’s available on the organization’s site, Yerushalmi explained the ins and outs of the sample legislation. His bills  differ from the failed Oklahoma amendment in one key way: They don’t mention Sharia. Instead, they focus more broadly on “foreign laws and foreign legal doctrines.” As Yerushalmi explained in an interview with the nativist New English Review in December, the language is “facially neutral,” thereby achieving the same result while “avoiding the sticky problems of our First Amendment jurisprudence.”
Since crafting the sample legislation, Yerushalmi’s services have been been in high demand as an expert witness. In mid-February, he flew to South Dakota to testify in support of a bill modeled on his “American Law for American Courts” plan. (He also offered to provide pro-bono legal support for the state if the law produced any legal challenges.)
Ultimately, the bill died in committee, after the state’s attorney general testified that the bill could lead to lawsuits. “I am a little chagrined by the fact that none of the opponents of the bill have actually read it with any care,” Yerushalmi told the committee. “Something else is at work here.”
But it’s not just Muslims who draw Yerushalmi’s scorn. In a 2006 essay for SANE entitled On Race: A Tentative Discussion (pdf), Yerushalmi argued that whites are genetically superior to blacks. “Some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones,” he wrote.

Yerushalmi has suggested that Caucasians are inherently more receptive to republican forms of government than blacks—an argument that’s consistent with SANE’s mission statement, which emphasizes that “America was the handiwork of faithful Christians, mostly men, and almost entirely white.” And in an article published at the website Intellectual Conservative, Yerushalmi, who is Jewish, suggests that liberal Jews “destroy their host nations like a fatal parasite.” Unsurprisingly, then, Yerushalmi offered the lone Jewish defense of Mel Gibson, after the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade in 2006. Gibson, he wrote, was simply noting the “undeniable Jewish liberal influence on western affairs in the direction of a World State.”
Despite his racist views, Yerushalmi has been warmly received by mainstream conservatives; his work has appeared in the National Review and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Peace. He’s been lauded in the pages of the Washington Times. And in 2008, he published a paper on the perils of Sharia-compliant finance that compelled Sen. Minority Whip John Kyl (R-Ariz.) to write a letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox.
More recently, Yerushalmi co-authored a report on the threats posed by Islamic law—among other things, he worries Sharia-compliant finance could spark another financial collapse—that earned plaudits from leading Republicans like Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra. The report was released by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, for which Yerushalmi is general counsel.

In 2007, he pushed legislation to make “adherence to Shari’a” a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. That same proposal called for the deportation of all Muslim non-citizens, and a ban on Muslim immigration. The United States, he urged, must declare “a WAR AGAINST ISLAM and all Muslim faithful.”
Neither Yerushalmi nor the American Public Policy Alliance responded to a request for comment for this article.
If his racially infused writings and rhetoric are any indication, it’s Yerushalmi, not his Muslim bogeymen, who seems most determined to remake the American political system. Per its mission statement, SANE is “dedicated to the rejection of democracy and party rule,” and Yerushalmi has likewise criticized the universal suffrage movement. As he once put it, “there’s a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

]Tim Murphy is a reporter at Mother Jones. Email him with tips and insights at tmurphy@motherjones.com.

Islamophobia Rears its Ugly Head Following Foreign Office Visit to MB

Ikhwanweb

Triggering again the face of Islamophobia was the recent visit Thursday by a delegation from the British Foreign Office, to the Muslim Brotherhood’s administrative office in Alexandria.

The visit led by Consul-General Marie- Louise Archer and Foreign Office Relations Coordinator Martin Hetringen was slammed by the Quilliam Foundation think tank in London which was based to allegedly counter- terrorism.

The meeting which was amiable according to Archer was part of British efforts to increase cooperation and accepting cultural differences with Egypt’s political and intellectual trends after the January 25 revolution. It obviously worried trends who opposed the MB participating in the political arena

According to James Brandon, head of research at Quilliam admittedly the Brotherhood is a major player in Egypt and it is not unreasonable for the British government to meet with its representatives. Demonstrating a model example of both Islamophobia and Ikhwanophobia however he continued, accusing the MB of masterminding the engagement ’to further its own anti-Western agenda and to sideline more liberal Muslim voices adding the efforts were to whitewash its own extremist beliefs.

It has been repeatedly reiterated by the MB and those who understand the group that it has and always will promote nothing but peace and does not nor will resort to violence hence it is a moderate group and the fears are unfounded. Furthermore MB leader Hamdy Hassan said the meeting had been a good opportunity to exchange views and discuss the group’s view on the forthcoming elections indicating there are neither hidden agendas nor plans. He told the delegation that the MB does not discriminate among presidential candidates and discussed the group’s party platform and position with regard to women and Copts. He asserted the group seeks to participate not dominate and it is from the people and for the people.

Although Brandon denounced the British government stressing it had no idea on how to engage critically with the group regarding it as the authentic voice of the Arab street a spokesman for the Foreign Office has confirmed that it will continue to have contact with the MB who are a very likely to be part of the current political dialogue in Egypt.

Egypt: Deputy PM: Brotherhood inclined to Turkish model for state

Source

The Muslim Brotherhood would favor a Turkish model for Egypt rather than the Iranian model for an Islamic state, Egypt’s deputy prime minister said Tuesday.

At a forum held in Cairo, Deputy Prime Minister Yehia al-Gamal said that although the Brotherhood is Egypt’s largest organized group, it does not represent the majority.

“Transparent elections will prove this,” he said at the forum, in which Brotherhood Deputy Supreme Guide Khairat al-Shater participated.

News reports had claimed the Brotherhood made a deal with the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) about forming Egypt’s new government after the 25 January revolution. Both the Brotherhood and the SCAF dismissed the reports as false.

Al-Gamal said he does not fear the Brotherhood, adding they are abandoning a religious state model. However, he added that the Brotherhood still has some extreme factions.

Al-Shater, meanwhile, said the Brotherhood will not implement punishments stipulated in Islamic Sharia if it seizes power, adding that the group is currently trying to reassure the West, which he said fears the Brotherhood.

Al-Shater said former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime used the Brotherhood as a scare tactic to establish the regime’s rule, managing to tarnish the group’s reputation.

Addressing the audience, he said, ” As an organized faction, the Brotherhood does not seek power or competition over parliamentary majority… Rather, it wants to achieve one goal, that of developing Egypt.”

Translated from the Arabic Edition

Countering Islamophobia: PSA on Comcast

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Countering Islamophobia – TV Ads on Comcast

There is no doubt that Islamophobia is at its peak in US. More than ever there is a need to counter the Islam smearing campaign launched by the conservative right. ICNA Bay Area partnered with USA network as part of NBC Universal media group for a month long campaign to promote religious tolerance in US.

TV commercials featuring CharactersUnite.com and WhyIslam.org were broadcast for 2 weeks in April 11, 2011. 130 Ads appeared on A&E, AMC, Animal Planet, CNN, Planet Green, Hallmark, History, Headlines Network, MSNBC, National Geographic, Oprah Winfrey Network, Travel Channel, The Weather Channel, and USA Network.

For more information on Islam visit WhyIslam.org

The sharia panic factory

David Yerushalmi

One of the more striking things about the current anti-sharia craze is how often state legislators who introduce anti-sharia bills can’t answer basic questions about Islamic law or why they see it as a threat.

In Alabama, for example, when the state senator who sponsored an anti-sharia bill was asked by a reporter to simply define sharia, he responded: “I don’t have my file in front of me.” In Florida, anti-sharia bill sponsors couldn’t name a single case where Islamic or international law had been used in a troubling way in U.S. courts. When, on Wednesday, I interviewed a Nebraska state senator behind a similar bill, I asked him about what cases were causes of concern to him. He responded: “I’m not in my office to look them up.”

How could all these legislators be so uninformed about their own bills? A big part of the reason is that most of them did not actually write the legislation in question. Rather, many of the anti-sharia bills being considered around the country are either based on or directly copied from model legislation created by an obscure far-right Arizona attorney and activist named David Yerushalmi.

The Nebraska case is instructive. State Sen. Mark Christensen introduced a bill (.pdf) in January to bar the use of any foreign law in Nebraska courts. When I spoke to Christensen on Wednesday, he acknowledged he did not have a deep understanding of the issue, referring me back to his office when I asked him what cases involving sharia or foreign law were troubling to him.

He summed up his reason for sponsoring the bill: “This is America. We use America’s law.” (For more on what sharia actually is, see here and here.)

It turns out Christensen introduced the bill after his office was approached by the head of the local chapter of the anti-Muslim group* ACT! for America, Christensen aide Dan Wiles told me. ACT! for America is a Florida-based group led by Brigitte Gabriel. In a profile last month, the New York Times detailed Gabriel’s strategy of selectively quoting the Quran to paint most or all Muslims as violent extremists.

“They came and talked to several different senators, and Sen. Christensen decided to introduce the bill,” Wiles said, adding that he was presented with model legislation. “It pretty much was exactly what was drafted and introduced,” he said. “Everything substantive was the same.”

The model legislation in question originates with Yerushalmi, the Arizona lawyer who is associated with several organizations including the American Public Policy Alliance. The model anti-foreign law bill on the Public Policy Alliance’s website has been used in states including Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri and South Dakota. It is called “American Laws for American Courts.”

Who is Yerushalmi? His background leaves little doubt that these anti-“foreign law” bills are designed to target sharia.

He has written, for example, that “The Muslim peoples, those committed to Islam as we know it today, are our enemies.” A group he founded, the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), has reportedly advocated for a law making it a felony “punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.” The Anti-Defamation League has also called out Yerushalmi for his “anti-black bigotry.” (Mother Jones also has a good profile of Yerushalmi here.)

So next time the sponsor of an anti-sharia bill can’t answer basic questions about Islamic law, it’s a good sign Yerushalmi’s role deserves more scrutiny.

* UPDATE 4/9/11: ACT! For America spokesman Hal Weatherman disputes the characterization of the group as “anti-Muslim.” He writes: “We are open in our opposition to the radical ‘Islamist’ ideology that is driving acts of terrorism in the world today, but not the Muslim faith in general.”

As the Times’ profile of the group observes, however, ACT! has tended to demonize Islam and the Quran.

Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin

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THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD: Testimony by Dr. Nathan Brown

By Dr. Nathan Brown

Source

As Egypt transitions to democracy, the once-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood is looking to play a more active role in the nation’s political life. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Nathan J. Brown explains why the Brotherhood does not pose a security threat to the United States and should be welcomed as a legitimate political actor.

U.S. Policy Recommendations:

“There is every reason to be interested in the Brotherhood’s myriad (and surprisingly diverse) country-based movements, but there is no reason to fear it as a menacing global web,” concludes Brown.

Download the full Testimony

The Disappearance of the Nightmare Arab

How a Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam
By James Carroll

Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.

For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.

The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God

For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” — all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden — to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance — has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?

Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.

Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?

In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.

Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.

It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person — as the Qu’ran says — as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.

A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies

The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.

History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.

Because so many people have believed in themselves — protecting one another simply by standing together — they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).

Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake — in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.

To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.

The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice

Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”

Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.

Scary, indeed — but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did — with that “we” defined as Western civilization.

Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula — all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.

How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam — that it was only “spread by the sword” — was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.

Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.

“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”

No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” — the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.

The Revolution of Hope

The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.

Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious — an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.

James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published.

Bus advertising campaign tackles Islamophobia

By Divya Talwar
BBC Asian Network

Vehicles in several cities will carry the message “Muslims for loyalty, peace and freedom” in an attempt to challenge negative stereotypes of the faith.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Association, the group behind the campaign, said it hoped it would educate people about Islam and remove misconceptions.

But some Muslim groups have criticised the campaign as “unrealistic”.

The campaign, which began on 26 March, will see almost 100 buses in London and 60 in Glasgow display the poster for four to eight weeks.

It will then be rolled out to other cities including Leicester, Birmingham, Leeds and Bradford over the next six months.

Volunteers will also distribute leaflets door-to-door throughout the UK explaining the peaceful and positive principles of the faith.

”Through this campaign we are trying to clarify the true teachings of Islam, to speak out against injustices, suicide bombings and terrorism,” said Rafiq Hayat, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association’s national president.

Islamophobia has been seen by some to be an increasing problem in the UK.

Last year, an online YouGov poll of 2,152 adults commissioned by the the Exploring Islam Foundation, found that 58% of those questioned linked Islam with extremism, while 69% believed it encouraged the repression of women.

In a recent speech, Baroness Warsi, co-chairman of the Conservative party, said anti-Muslim prejudice had passed the “dinner table test” to become uncontroversial and socially acceptable by Britons.

Rafiq Hayat said Islam was a religion of peace and should not be hijacked by a minority of extremists.

“As Muslims it pains us when our religion is tarnished by the actions of a minority of people who promote violence and hatred,” he said.

”Terror offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam.

”Islam means peace and we want to convey the real message of the religion to the people of this country,” he said.

But there was scepticism within the Muslim community of the campaign’s effectiveness.

Massoud Shadjareh, chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which monitors Islamophobia, said it had a great deal of evidence showing it was increasing.

He said he was doubtful whether the campaign would change negative perceptions.

”There is nothing wrong with doing something like this, but the reality is that you can’t just make people think differently,” he said.

”No-one on the street is going to look at the message on the buses and say ‘oh is that right, from now on I’m not going to stereotype Muslims’. This is very unrealistic.”

But the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association remained confident it would be a small but positive step forwards.

“Shouting slogans is never going to be enough in itself,” said Naseer Dean, president of the association’s London branch.

”But what it will do is start a debate, a conversation, that perhaps is not being had at the moment, and it is right for the Muslim community to instigate this, because they are the ones primarily being affected.”

Welcome to the Shari’ah Conspiracy Theory Industry

By Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches

At February’s Conservative Political Action Conference, a student from the group Youth for Western Civilization at Liberty University asked members of a panel titled “The Shari’ah Challenge to the West”: “Are we going to see a rise of Islamic Europe, and America just sits there on its own… are we actually going to win?” Another audience member asked, “what recourse does America have as a country… to deal with that problem with a completely won Islamist population? What recourse do we have at home and abroad?”

That these questions were treated as legitimate lines of inquiry at a conference that serves as a dog and pony show for Republican presidential candidates demonstrates the success of a cottage industry of anti-Muslim fearmongers (politicians, religious groups, ministers, self-styled national security experts, former government officials, retired military officers, pundits, and writers) who have cultivated a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that totalitarian Islamic radicals are bent on infiltrating America, displacing the Constitution, and subverting Western-style democracy in the U.S. and around the globe.

As Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, opens his hearings into “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” this week, these conspiracy theories will take center stage in the halls of the United States Congress in the latest and most blatant McCarthy-esque twist in the rising level of Islamophobia in the United States. Anti-Muslim diatribe and activity have reached what Marshall Breger, a law professor at Catholic University, an Orthodox Jew and a Republican, has described as a “season of singular national distemper where, for reasons best understood by social psychiatrists, the American people have entered into what can only be described as ‘open season’ on Islam.”

The conspiracy theorists succeed by using self-styled, unqualified “experts” to stoke fears of secret plots of Muslims to take over America and replace its Constitution with shari’ah law. That they even point to shari’ah, says Lena Salaymeh, a Harvard-trained lawyer now working on her doctorate in Islamic legal history at Berkeley, is evidence of their ignorance about Islamic law, politics, and culture.

“There’s a cottage industry in the West of people who pretend to be experts on Islam, who are getting a lot of time in the media,” Salaymeh points out. “It wouldn’t pass in any other context that you would get people who really know nothing turning into experts. But it happens in this context because they’re saying what people want to hear.”

If one untangles what that cottage industry is saying, one can detect five claims of the shari’ah conspiracy theory: that the goal of Islam is totalitarianism; that the mastermind of bringing this totalitarianism to the world is the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of all Islamic groups from Hamas to the Islamic Society of North America; that these organizations within the United States are traitors in league with the American left and are bent on acts of sedition against America; that the majority of mosques in the United States are run by imams who promote such sedition; and that through this fifth column, shari’ah law has already infiltrated the United States and could result in a complete takeover if not stopped.

What Shari’ah Really Is

In an interview with the Center for American Progress, Intisar Rabb, a member of the law faculty at Boston College Law School, explains that: “Shari’ah is the ideal law of God according to Islam… Shari’ah has tremendous diversity, as jurists and learned scholars figure out and articulate what that law is…”

In pre-colonial times, Salaymeh added, jurists—legal thinkers—would determine fiqh, the understanding of what divine law is based on their interpretation of religious texts. It’s important to note, however, that because human interpretations of divine revelation vary, and because there’s no central Islamic authority, there is no fixed legal definition of shari’ah.

In post-colonial times in the Middle East and North Africa, as a means of “coalesc[ing] popular support against imperialism,” Salaymeh explains, some activists promoted “Islamic unity,” in which use of “Islamic law” became a popular rhetoric. Rabb, too, noted, “Historically, Shari’ah served as a means for political dissent against arbitrary rule.”

“So shari’ah became a battle cry of resistance,” Salaymeh says. “It’s used by certain political groups to claim they are not being represented, or that their government is not representative of the people. So it’s more about representation and identity than it is about specific codes or laws.”

Even though some political activists in Middle Eastern and North African countries promote “Islamic law” in reaction to the imposition of European-style government and legal systems on them, there is no single school of thought on what shari’ah, or divine law, is or means—and there is no single, accepted legal code. “If Islamic law were some book where you could look to it and cite to it, and say, it says right here that Western democracy is bad, then maybe that would make sense. But that’s just ridiculous… This claim of Islam’s incompatibility with democracy has nothing to do with anything historical, or anything in legal texts.”

The cottage industry, she says, points to some aspects of Wahhabism, such as requirements on dress codes, and portray that as representative of Islamic thought. “The problem is, I don’t think that they understand that Islamic law means different things to different people in different places. None of these Wahhabi interpretations of Islam are applicable or relevant to all of the world’s Muslims, most of whom are not Arab, it’s important to remember.” (Most American Muslims are not of Arab descent either; according to a 2007 Pew poll, of the 65% of American Muslims who were born abroad only 24% were born in Arab countries.)

That strict Wahhabism—which the Saudi government helps promote and fund in and outside of Saudi Arabia—is not representative of Islam globally. Such Wahhabism, according to Salaymeh, is an “extremist strain” on the periphery of the Muslim community. “In a weird way,” she says, “the neo-cons are in dialogue with the extremists and are legitimating the extremists’ position by refusing to recognize that there are other interpretations of Islam and experiences of Islam that are not the Wahhabi one.”

You Can View The Whole article Here: Religion Dispatches

Walking the Line Between Islam and Fear

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Islamophobes on a Shrink’s Couch

By Eva Herrmann and Sarah Schwepcke and Diliana Stoyanova for ISN Insights

In the case of extreme fears, patients are often advised to visit a psychotherapist in an attempt to overcome them. Therapists, using behavioral approaches, try to break down the fear into manageable problems that can be overcome by identifying the thoughts and perceptions that underlie them. The fears in question are not mere anxieties, they are phobias: extreme, irrational fears of particular things or situations.

Phobias exist not only on the personal level, but also in the public realm. One social phobia that has caused substantial divisions across a wide range of countries is the fear of Islamic terrorism, the invasion of Islamic values and general Muslim predominance in Western societies. Fueled by news of terrorist attacks and security alerts across the world, xenophobic fears relating to Muslims and Islam have been labeled “Islamophobia” and used in a variety of heated political debates.

From the minaret ban in Switzerland, to the New York mosque controversy and the Danish cartoons, the conceptual construct of Islamophobia has become a reality, even though the term itself remains contested. Is it really an unreasonable fear and thus a phobia? What exactly is the object of that fear and where does it come from?

By examining the roots of the fear, we aim to put this phobia to the test, and to put the ‘Islamophobes’ on a proverbial ‘shrink’s couch’. Informed by original research, as well as interviews with a variety of stakeholders this article seeks to identify innovative solutions that will help address this rising tide of intolerance.

Islamophobia as a controversy in itself

The word “Islamophobia” combines the words “Islam” and “phobia”. While “phobia” refers to an unreasonable fear, as previously noted, “Islam” refers to Islamic culture. “Islam” is not to be confused with “Muslim” as the latter refers to religious beliefs and the individual believer. The term is, however, fundamentally judgmental, conceptually confused and deeply contested. To what degree, for example, does the fear or phobia refer to Islamic culture as a whole or to the religion specifically? In academic debates prominent experts such as Samuel D Huntington and Edward Saïd have observed that Islam has become the new “threatening other” to the West, long before the first utilization of the term “Islamophobia” in print by the Runnymede Trust in 1997. Both the common understanding and academic use of the term “Islamophobia” thus seems to favor an interpretation that signifies a fear of Islamic culture in general.

According to Reinhard Schulze , Professor of Islamic Studies and Oriental Philology at the Univerity of Bern, until the 1980s the term was used mainly to describe the historical attitudes of political actors towards Islamic institutions and claims of universal validity of their teachings by Muslim intellectuals. Back then, it denoted not a fear of Islam itself but rather a negative attitude toward the individual Muslim. The fear of Islam in a broader sense has been fostered through incidences like the 1990-91 Gulf war or the 2001/2004/2005 terrorist attacks, Schulze adds. Those events resulted in the rationalization of the feeling of the ‘threat’.

It has become “one of these things that you can feel in the air – in the headlines of newspapers, the way media reports on Islamic affairs, the way Islam is being discussed in forums and talk shows and even in potential love relationships”, says Khaled Al-Berry, an Egyptian-born journalist and writer, and former member of the terrorist organization Jama’a Islamiya. He claims that when media reports on Muslim countries, it almost “seems as if Muslims there don’t lead the kind of ordinary lives others do”. Headlines always suggest that there are “Muslims on the one side and You on the other”. This argument is supported by Nicolas Blancho, the head of the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland, who states that most movies stereotype Muslims as the ‘bad guy’ whereas the Western hero is always the ‘good guy’, making symbolic cultural expressions of the ” battleground of these anxieties “.

Schulze and Al-Berry both come to the conclusion that the fear in itself does not necessarily embody the problem society is facing today, which is derived much more from feelings of separation, alienation and the potential creation of  “enemy–within groups”. The real problem is the way people handle fear or suspicions, by claiming a definitive interpretation of Islam without a solid basis. Yet, because the discussion is an exchange of opinions and not facts, it is immune to re-examination. Moreover, if actors in the public sphere put forward their own interpretations or narratives, this discourse is widely perceived as legitimate, and facts are pushed to the side. Thus, a long-term effort to counteract the fear can be destroyed very quickly by politically motivated maneuverings.

The end result is that arguments in favor of fearing Islam outweigh arguments that try to alleviate the fear or constructively address it. And, as psychology and behavioral therapies tell us, these perceptions lead to a situation in which the person concerned does not even realize that his or her opinions have been formed as a result of fears, instead of rational analysis. This phobia then gets ‘institutionalized‘ in a process that rationalizes the thoughts through radically selective perception; what Schulze calls a “tunnel-mentality”. Al-Berry notes that this applies to both sides: Muslims “interpret what is happening in different areas of the world as aggression towards Islam. They react aggressively”, and so the destructive pattern is repeated.

Digging for roots

“The source of Islamophobia is religion and religious doctrines – one could say. Yet Islamophobia is also present in non-religious societies,” comments Al-Berry. When analyzing the fear of Islam, it becomes evident that to a large degree Islam is being repelled because people feel threatened. They are experiencing fear of change, instability and of losing their “Western identity”. According to Yahya Pallavicini, the Imam of the Al-Wahid mosque in Milan and vice-president of the Islamic Religious Community of Italy, changes in communication and technology can lead to social uncertainties that are especially hard to handle for the older generation, currently in control of policymaking. This is reinforced by a general ” globalization anxiety “, which “refers to fears regarding the loss of collective identities as a result of increasing flows of people, things, ideas, or creative expressions”. Lilo Roost-Vischer, Lecturer in Ethnology at the University of Basel, supports this reasoning and compares it to the fear of losing one’s homeland. Another reason why Islam in particular is perceived with such fear is its image of rigidity. In essence the concept has little to do with Islam as such. Indeed, Muslim societies have also experienced the phenomenon of “Westophobia” as an equal, mirrored construct to Islamophobia.

Moreover, the diversity of culture within Islam is neglected and simplified by ‘labeling’ Islam dangerous as a whole. According to Pallavicini and Blancho, the lack of knowledge concerning Islamic culture is another key source of Islamophobia. This ignorance gains expression in laws that ban open religious expressions like the construction of minarets in Switzerland. Despite the fact that 57 percent of Swiss voters supported the ban, there is evidence that “people who had more contact with Muslims tended to vote no”. Most worryingly, a number of national polls around the world, indicate support for a similar ban in other Western countries, from 38 percent in Germany, and 27 percent in Canada and the UK, to 21 percent in the US.

Overcoming fears

To cure a phobia two things are necessary: self-realization and therapy. It is clear at this stage that most ‘Islamophobes’ still have a long way to go on their path to self-realization. For instance, European right-wing parties claim that Islamophobia is a made-up construct, while at the same time using these very fears for political ends. This underlines the need for new tools of self-realization both at the individual and collective levels. This argument is supported by Blancho, who says that a more fruitful approach would be to support Muslims in their emancipation through better education, giving them better economic opportunities, the ability to participate in political discussions and to make use of their civil rights and duties. Such a self-realization could put Muslims on par with Swiss – or indeed any other western – citizens, and thus encourage dialogue that works directly against Islamophobia.

Furthermore, while safeguarding the need to be sensitive about religious identities and beliefs, another possible avenue for progress and self-realization for both sides is the use of satire and humor as a platform for interaction and learning, an idea supported by Pallavicini, among others. This may already be happening in the form of so-called ” stand –up diplomacy “. One example from the US is the ” Axis of Evil ” comedy group. Ahmed Ahmed , an Egyptian-American member of the group quotes a comedy colleague who is a rabbi: “He always says you can’t hate anybody when you’re laughing with them.” In Europe, Turkish-German comedians have been gaining popularity. For instance, Kerim Pamuk ‘s “most important topic on stage is the relationship between Germans and Turks, something he compares to a dysfunctional marriage”. Just as ancient humoristic fables were used to highlight the wrongdoings of the powerful through an “innocent story”, humor could become a platform through which self-realization can occur for both sides.

While many call for more dialogue, according to Pallavicini, dialogue in itself is not the goal. Rather, the aim is to open minds in the framework of a multi-disciplinary approach that includes comedy, art, music, conferences, round-tables, education and research. This corresponds to the second part of the suggested therapy: breaking down the fear into smaller parts. By bringing efforts down to the grassroots level of society, through individual bridge builders, civil society, schools, sports-clubs and other community institutions, successful problem-solving and the alleviation of fears and alienation could be achieved. An elitist approach does not reach all the people concerned, as Blancho reaffirms. On the other hand, Al-Berry states that a confident authority, insisting on the rule of law and promoting equality in all things has to be at the basis of the overall effort to rid society of destructive and discriminatory phobias. Looking “at the legitimate grievances of minorities and addressing them in their context” should be part of the solution, instead of ignoring or overemphasizing them.

In breaking down the problem of Islamophobia, attention has to be given to the question of definitions without being trapped by rhetoric, Blancho emphasizes. Moreover, radical differentiation of the parties as ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ – ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in essence – has to be avoided. In such a framework, as Roost-Vischer states, the aim is to strengthen individual identities on both sides of the debate without devaluing the foreign identity. Dialogue partners should thus focus on commonalities instead of differences, Schulze suggests. Indeed future generations need to be guided in less ‘phobic’ directions in general. The ‘therapeutic’ approach outlined here should thus not only be directed at the ever-present and sadly growing problem of Islamophobia, but also at any new fears that may end up replacing it in the future.

Eva Herrmann is currently working toward a Master in European Studies at the University of Basel. Her main areas of research interest include relations between European and Arabic countries from a political science perspective.

Sarah Schwepcke is finalizing her Master in International Affairs and Governance at the University of St Gallen. She also pursued a Master in the International Management Program at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research interests include the links between business and politics, particularly economic development, cross-cultural management and the Middle-East/North African region, where she has worked and studied extensively.

Diliana Stoyanova holds a Bachelor of Laws from Nagoya University in Japan and a Master in International Law and Economics from the World Trade Institute in Bern. She recently finished an internship at the External Relations Division of the World Trade Organization and is about to commence a traineeship at the Information Society and Media DG of the European Commission. Her research interests center on inter-cultural communication and the Internet’s influence on traditional social dilemmas.

Robert Spencer’s Co-religionist had Sex with Boys to Cure their Homosexuality, What if He was Muslim?

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Most of us in America learned something about prejudice and stereotypes in school. We know it’s wrong to misrepresent whole groups of people by highlighting only the worst behavior amongst them. Anyone can easily “prove” their religion, ideology, or culture is the most supreme by cherry-picking the worst examples of their opponents and “comparing” it to their highest ideals. Stereotyping, quite frankly, is cheating in the discipline of comparative religion/ideology/culture. But for Robert Spencer, stereotyping isn’t a social evil to be resisted. It’s a career.

Well, let’s turn the tables on him. A former youth pastor in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says he had sex with teenage boys because it was his pastoral duty “to help (the teen) with homosexual urges by praying while he had sexual contact with him.”

Earlier this month, Brent Girouex, 31, was arrested on 60 counts of suspicion of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist, reported The Daily Nonpareil…

Court documents indicated Girouex told investigators the most sexual contact he had was with one teen over a four-year period, starting when the boy was 14 years old. Calling the contact “mutual,” he said it had occurred between “25 and 50 times” during that period…

“When they would ejaculate, they would be getting rid of the evil thoughts in their mind,” Girouex allegedly told detectives.

Truly a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and horribly disturbing account of a Christian leader exploiting his position of authority and trust to sexually gratify himself at the expense of innocent minors. This is certainly not the first time a priest or minister has abused children. If we were running an anti-Christian hate site (similar to Spencer’s anti-Muslim hate site), this incident would make a fine addition to our police blotter propaganda. We could make a strong case for the weak-minded that Christianity is a sex-with-boys religion. After all, Mr. Girouex appealed to Christian theology and scriptures to justify his misdeeds. This sort of thing happens all the time! What more evidence do you need? Case closed.

Or is it? We’re not running an anti-Christian hate site. We know the vast majority of Christians reject this kind of behavior. Neither does Mr. Girouex’s action agree with the spirit of Christianity. It’s common sense. Rather, we promote the American values of tolerance and pluralism. We have stated this repeatedly. Yet, if you’re Robert Spencer, whatever a Muslim does wrong, no matter how aberrant or outside the mainstream, it must have happened because of Islam and no other reason, even if the perpetrator is mentally ill.

So here’s my question, Mr. Spencer. Is it fair to label Christianity a religion of sexual perversion? Is it fair to blame Christian theology and texts for these crimes? Should we hold senate hearings to protect little boys from their Churches? Shouldn’t we stop being “politically correct”? Aren’t all Christians collectively guilty for not speaking out enough? Aren’t we justified if we gather together to shout obscenities outside the local church of the raping-boys religion?

Of course, Spencer won’t accept that any of these suggestions are fair, but when it comes to Islam there is a different standard. And this, as we learned in grade school, is the essence of stereotyping. Not only does Spencer consistently violate the Golden Rule (“do unto others what you would have done unto yourself”), in which he claims to believe, but also, as Senator Durbin recently said, his hateful rhetoric violates “the spirit of our Bill of Rights.”

Your Islamophobic House of Cards is falling, Bob. Keep working on that résumé.

Anti-terrorism training draws scrutiny

By Shaun Waterman | The Washington Times

Anti-Islam stereotypes, political correctness are rival fears

Two senators have launched an inquiry into federally funded counterterrorism training for state and local police, saying they are concerned some of the instruction includes inflammatory and inaccurate anti-Muslim stereotyping. But the move has ignited fears that political correctness might undermine the training.

“We are concerned … that state and local law enforcement agencies are being trained by individuals who not only do not understand the ideology of violent Islamist extremism, but also cast aspersions on a wide swath of ordinary Americans merely because of their religious affiliation,” wrote Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Susan M. Collins, Maine Republican, in a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano.

The two senators, who work closely together as the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked for details of the two departments’ grant funding for counterterrorism training and for information about any standards or guidelines that training had to meet to qualify for federal money — including instructors’ qualifications.

The senators said staff inquiries had uncovered evidence that “improper training may not be limited to mere isolated occurrences.”

Since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, billions of federal dollars have been poured into grant programs for state and local police and other first responders, with much of that spent on counterterrorism training. But there are few standards for such courses, and the senators fret that some trainers may be unqualified and some training counterproductive.

The senators cited recent news reports of “self-appointed counterterrorism training experts as engaging in vitriolic diatribes and making assertions such as “Islam is a highly violent, radical religion.”

“But Islam demonstrably is a violent religion,” said Robert Spencer, an author and blogger whose writings on Islam have proved controversial. “Not every Muslim is violent, but the religion teaches and encourages violence against non-Muslims.”

Mr. Spencer says he has taken part in counterterrorism training for U.S. military and intelligence agencies and the FBI, but not state and local police. He told The Washington Times he was concerned the senators’ inquiry could lead to “politically correct guidelines to stop people teaching the truth about Islam, especially from the Obama administration.”

Mr. Spencer, who has a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has studied Islam for three decades and written 10 books on the faith.

Walid Phares, another counterterrorism consultant who has helped train state and local police forces, told The Times that organized Islamic extremists were “trying to confuse the public by mixing criticism of unprofessional training with criticism of the best strategic analysis available in the United States.”

He said he supported the senators’ work.

At the root of many of the disagreements about the content of the training courses are differences about the nature of Islam and its relationship to extremist terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

Many see political Islam — a vision of the religion as not just a personal faith, but a blueprint for society and its laws — as the real enemy in the war against terrorism and as a toxic influence on the American body politic.

But the Obama administration, like its predecessor, says Islam is a religion of peace and generally urges officials not to describe al Qaeda and other terrorist groups as Islamic, but simply as violent extremists.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement released Tuesday evening, said the agency understands the senators’ concerns.

All DHS grant recipients providing training to state and local law enforcement partners “are expected to reflect the same professionalism and courtesy that is expected of all DHS and DHS component personnel,” according to the statement.