Tuesday, March 06, 2007
The Summit on Secular Islam
My last post discussed the Summit St. Petersburg Declaration which I felt deserved special and seperate treatment. This post provides more information about the summit.
For full coverage of the summit, start with Gateway Pundit: Secular Islam Summit: Secularism & Islamic Thought. It has pictures, video, quotes and commentary in several posts.
Follow up with Bret Stephens' excellent article on the summit in the WSJ.com. As it may require subscription, here are some of his observations :
* At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims.
* Canadian author Irshad Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it." The difference is not trivial. For more than five years, the Bush administration has been attempting to enlist the support of the so-called moderates in the war on terror -- its definition of "moderate" being remarkably elastic, to put it charitably.
He notes cogently that, while the FBI is providing considerable security for the conference, the State Department has no representatives here, nor is the VOA (Voice of America) or any US-sponsored Arabic language media present.
* Al-Jazeera, however, is here, suggesting that the real Arab mainstream better appreciates the broad interest the conference's speakers attract in the Muslim world, as well as their latent power. Perhaps this is the flip side of the appeal of extremist Islam, an indication that what Muslims are mainly looking for are radical alternatives to the unpalatable mush of unpopular autocratic governments, state-approved clerics like Sheikh Tantawi, and Saudi-funded "mainstream" organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He closes with two good questionst: If Mr. Warraq, Dr. Sultan et al. are really irrelevant to the larger Muslim debate, why are the jihadists so eager to kill them? And if the jihadists want to kill them, don't they deserve support as well as security?
Indeed. ( and a thanks to InstaPundit and Michael Ledeen for these leads).
For full coverage of the summit, start with Gateway Pundit: Secular Islam Summit: Secularism & Islamic Thought. It has pictures, video, quotes and commentary in several posts.
Follow up with Bret Stephens' excellent article on the summit in the WSJ.com. As it may require subscription, here are some of his observations :
* At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims.
* Canadian author Irshad Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it." The difference is not trivial. For more than five years, the Bush administration has been attempting to enlist the support of the so-called moderates in the war on terror -- its definition of "moderate" being remarkably elastic, to put it charitably.
He notes cogently that, while the FBI is providing considerable security for the conference, the State Department has no representatives here, nor is the VOA (Voice of America) or any US-sponsored Arabic language media present.
* Al-Jazeera, however, is here, suggesting that the real Arab mainstream better appreciates the broad interest the conference's speakers attract in the Muslim world, as well as their latent power. Perhaps this is the flip side of the appeal of extremist Islam, an indication that what Muslims are mainly looking for are radical alternatives to the unpalatable mush of unpopular autocratic governments, state-approved clerics like Sheikh Tantawi, and Saudi-funded "mainstream" organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He closes with two good questionst: If Mr. Warraq, Dr. Sultan et al. are really irrelevant to the larger Muslim debate, why are the jihadists so eager to kill them? And if the jihadists want to kill them, don't they deserve support as well as security?
Indeed. ( and a thanks to InstaPundit and Michael Ledeen for these leads).
Comments:
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I am a big supporter of Manji and her work, and am definitely looking forward to the airing of Faith Without Fear in April. I found the film on the PBS website and saw that is just one of 11 films in a larger series called America at a Crossroads that looks really promising. I was definitely going to watch the Manji film but having looked at the others will most likely end up watching the whole series.
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