Geraldine Doogue
Imam Ali, what do you believe are the major moral issues to be addressed in this campaign?

Imam Afroz Ali
The issue of climate change is a moral issue. I think I’m quoting Al Gore there. That it’s not a political matter. It’s a moral matter. And we need to return to understanding what the environment is. What is the environment? Why does it exist? Do we use it until the last drop of water on earth? Is that how it is? Is there a cross generational responsibility?

It’s interesting to note that the other religious representatives made similar points. And recently the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils were calling on the government to:

Ensure Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions peak and begin to decline in the next five years, set a long term reduction target of at least 60-90% below 1990 levels by 2050 and a pathway of strong interim targets to meet that long term target.

Is this a “major moral issue” for religious figures to be speaking out about? Or is it, as Frank Furedi wrote recently in Spiked Online:

These days, moralisers find it easier to make people feel guilty about their impact on the environment than about committing one of the seven deadly sins. Not surprisingly, many religious institutions are busy reinventing themselves by promoting ecological virtues and preaching against the eco-sins of polluters.

On occasions, the attempt to recycle traditional theological concerns in a green form becomes a caricature of itself. In August, Dom Anthony Sutch, a Benedictine monk, announced that he would hear eco-confessions of sins against the environment at the Waveney Greenpeace festival, in a confessional booth carefully constructed from recycled materials. The good monk clearly practices what he preaches. He tries ‘very hard’ to live a green lifestyle and is proud of his principal achievement – reducing his electricity bill by 30 per cent. This mock ritual is unlikely to offer penitents’ salvation or redemption, but their ‘awareness’ will be raised. And these days being ‘aware’ is recognised as akin to being virtuous.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another prescient example of this is Danny Nalliah, pastor of the fringe church “Catch the Fire Ministries“. Nalliah has previously been alleged to have expressed the desire for God to burn down mosques. For this and other comments Nalliah was taken to VCAT by the Islamic Council of Victoria for inciting religious hatred. The ICV action was a failure both legally and in the wider court of public opinion. It allowed Nalliah to portray himself as the victim of a secretive religion which was furiously trying to avoid scrutiny as it infiltrated the nation. Money, sympathy and support flooded into Catch the Fire Ministries and Nalliah became a celebrity in the Evangelical community. The federal treasurer Peter Costello appeared on stage with Nalliah and embraced him, as did the then deputy Prime Minister John Anderson.

The case was finally settled earlier this year, with a points victory to Nalliah. This has allowed him the confidence to discover his voice once more and to bless us with the profound insights that can come to those whom God speaks to directly.

This is the best bit:

The Lord told me to spend some personal time with Prime Minister John Howard and to prophetically prepare Federal Treasurer Peter Costello as the future Prime Minister of Australia. (I don’t know the exact timing, but I was obedient to the voice of God).

Nalliah goes to to declare his prophethood:

I know this prophetic declaration is very controversial, but at this critical crossroad in our nation’s destiny, it’s not time to tickle the ears of man, but to please the Father in Heaven, by boldly proclaiming His Authoritative Word of Righteousness, Justice, and Truth to the Church and Nation!

The mainstream readership of the News limited papers took a less charitable view of Nalliah’s intervention.

Still blissfully unaware of the wider community’s perception of him, Nalliah has met with the League of Rights, a fringe group who deny the Holocaust and peddle the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is not the first time Nalliah has shared a platform with the league.

This all begs the question, why on earth would it be in our interests to shut this man up? Note that during the 5 years of the legal battle Nalliah was treated sympathetically by the mainstream press. This has changed immediately once the case was concluded.

The glare of the media spotlight has been especially unflattering to Nalliah and his views. It has been a much more effective tool against him than the legal process could ever have been.

In the old city, our hotel sat adjacent to a madrassa where young children were taught Qur’an and Tajweed by a group of very kindly old sheikhs. After Fajr, one of the boys would take turns to lead the Salat and afterwards he would recite a long chapter of the Qur’an until the sun came up.The other boys would fall asleep at the back; the Sheikhs always pretended not to notice. Unlike the Blue Mosque, the madrassa, an engine room for Islam, was sinking into genteel poverty and survived on public charity alone. It was the target of periodic police harassment, as were the scholars who tutored for free.

In the West, Turkey is seen as the secular blueprint for modernizing the Muslim world. But rather than secularizing Islam, the Turkish state has appropriated it and desecrated religious worship by replacing it with an elaborate theatre of the absurd. This has required the creation of a compliant priestly class from amongst the Muslims, atop of which sits the Mufti. Many European democracies are now considering the institution of a chief mufti alongside other measures to regulate Islam.

European Muslims might look to the salutary example of Australia, where Muslims there stumbled into creating the post of Mufti of Australia in the late 1980s. Taj El-Din Hilaly, then the Egyptian Imam for the Lebanese community of Western Sydney, was to be deported for visa violations. An intervention by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC), the nominal umbrella body for Australian Muslims, contrived a way for Hilaly to prolong his stay — with the hastily cobbled-together title of Mufti of Australia. The Federal Labour government used this pretext to grant him permanent residence in Australia against the express advice of their own Minister of Immigration, who thought him profoundly unsuitable, an opinion that has been vindicated with hindsight.

Notwithstanding his visa issues, Hilaly has always been a controversial figure in Australia, both to Muslims and, more recently, to wider society. He has repeatedly made serious anti-Semitic remarks, has failed to develop substantive links with other religious groups, and his Masjid in Western Sydney — the largest in Australia — is widely criticised in the media. Hilaly, who does not speak English, communicates via an interpreter, which often leads to slightly absurd media interviews.

His tenure as Mufti of Australia has been extremely controversial. Yet, even if a more likely candidate were chosen, the creation of an office of Mufti is deeply problematic for many reasons.

The most obvious is that the office of Mufti ought to uphold excellence in scholarship of the sacred sciences, an excellence that is widely recognised by one’s peers. Where is that standard of scholarship today? One cannot look at the state of the Muslim community in the West and believe that from amongst its religious leadership one should be justly rewarded with such an accolade. Nor would any thoughtful sheikh be quick to assume the title of Mufti with its many weighty demands and responsibilities.

The second reason is that Mufti, in its modern connotations, is a title born of the modern world’s tension between the sacred and the secular, a vice that we have inherited from another civilization. Typically it is awarded to compliant religious leaders by the irreligious regimes that rule in the Muslim world. The modern muftiship has become a post for Muslim scholars where they can be systematically seduced, rewarded or manipulated as required.

The third reason springs from a question that we must answer ourselves, what do we want from our scholars? Who will write the great religious opinions of our time? Where are the Ahmad bin Hanbals or the al-Ghazalis of today? Who will take up Hasan al-Basri’s mantle of the ascetic, to stand apart from society and to be a fearless critic of it? All of these ulema have stood aloof from officialdom, and their remoteness from it energized their scholarship, freed undoubtedly from the endless train of interfaith marathons, and the perpetual release of captive birds “for peace”.

When we look to the future for religious leadership we must be entirely selfish in our aspirations. Whilst the selection of an appropriately moderate Mufti may (temporarily) placate sections of the wider community, it does not represent the goals and aspirations of Muslims themselves, nor does it advance the cause of Muslims in the West.

Whilst the imposition of a respectable order over the rowdy umma may seem the ideal solution for the times, it is the perpetual tension — of the free expression, of differing religious opinion — that has preserved the heart of Islamic orthodoxy.

This was originally published at Muslimstan.

Women have always been respected in the Indian culture. The purdah system was introduced to protect them from the Muslim invaders. However, times have changed. India is now independent and hence, the systems should also change.

This is simply untrue. One can understand Patil’s desire to harden her electoral numbers, no politician has ever failed by vilifying Muslims, and it taps into the Hindu nationalist agenda that the BJP and the RSS have been peddling for some time. It has also gained a mainstream audience through its most eloquent exponent, VS Naipaul.

Naipaul explains away India’s cultural failure by insisting that Islam has stifled it. I disagree, it is not so much that Islamic rulers stifled indigenous culture, indeed if they did, how could the vast majority of Indians remain Hindu? Rather that Islamic civilization produced a cultural output that has better endured. India, despite being ruled by Muslims for hundreds of years, has remained a Hindu majority country. The Islamic rulers of India have even been criticized by Muslim scholars for not eradicating customs that Muslims found offensive such as the conspicuous idolatry, the payment of a dowry by the woman at the time of the marriage contract (rather than the opposite as dictated by Sharia) and the burning of women on the funeral pyre of her husband (which is a deeply offensive crime for Muslims). If Muslims ruled India with an cultural iron fist as Naipaul insists, then ipso facto he would simply not exist or he would be a Muslim bigot pumping out polemical (but grammatically correct) pamphlets for Hizb-ul-Tahrir.

What Naipul, and other Indian nationalists should do is have the courage of their convictions and demolish the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, burn the books of Mughal Urdu poetry, ban the serving of meat dishes and direct tourists to their own great cultural achievements. A month-long tour of India on daal roti, snake charmers and a dip in the Ganges should give the visitor to India a lifetime legacy of Indian nationalism.

Patil has gone the one step further by suggesting that Islam is the reason that Indian women are treated badly, and the veil is an example of that. This so completely untrue, that one can only imagine that Patil is herself illiterate in her nation’s own history, or is betting that her audience is. If Muslims had insisted on their own Sharia for all India, then:

1. Brides in India would be paid a Mahr at the time of their wedding, rather than having to pay a dowry;
2. The practice of burning one’s wife (suttee) at the funeral pyre would have vanished long a ago;
3. The genocide against India’s unborn female infants would not exist. In this scholarly article, the Indian authors estimate that 10 million female infants have not been born in India.

India’s women can rightly insist, that if this is an example of society “respecting” them, then can it please stop doing so.

Patil’s silence on this issue shows she has no interest in the fate of her gender, but will use any tool, however blunt, to run a populist anti-Muslim agenda.

It also shows the disgraceful silence of western feministas who like Patil indulge their hatred of Muslims rather than defend the rights of women. If one does sincerely believe that a cloth placed over the head of a woman is deeply oppressive then what about gender-based abortion? The latter is purely a product of the modern, educated, industrialized India, with its pre-natal ultrasounds and its fee for service abortionists. Surely a sincere woman campaigning for high office in India on the platform of woman’s rights, would include amongst those rights, the right to exist.

It seems that some white women believe that a white woman’s right to an abortion without any restriction outweighs a brown woman’s right to be born.

THE Federal Government is considering “screening” technology to stop terrorist groups from recruiting vulnerable young members in Australia over the internet.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock told The Daily Telegraph yesterday the software plan – still in its infancy – was just one option in the escalating online war against terrorists.

“At the moment the internet is the biggest problem in this war and we are only going after people we can get our hands on, but that is changing,” Mr Ruddock said.

“We are looking at ways and means of using technology that detects hate publications and removes them.

“To do it effectively we will need the help of law enforcement agencies in the US and Europe.”

So how could they achieve this? The government could create a national filter — like China — and require all web traffic to pass through it. Sites that had previously been identified as ‘extremist’ would be banned, as would sites containing terms or phrases identified as markers of ‘hate speech’. The use of a probabilistic classifier such as the naive Bayes classifiers used in spam filtering might work provided the government has a suitable corpus of ‘hate publications’ to use as an input and provided people were willing to accept being prevented from accessing a broad range of legitimate material that was misclassified due to common word occurrences.

However, despite all this, it is still technically impossible to prevent people from accessing whatever they want on the internet. For example, freely available technology such as the popular Onion Router allow people to pass through government and ISP filtering proxies with ease. The government may be able to have sites taken down — though I suspect it might be hard in the United States where free speech is taken quite seriously — but that would just mean other sites reappear with the same content. At worst, it might be a minor inconvenience for determined wannabe jihadis to have to install TOR, the Freenet client or whatever tools appears next in response to the new filtering technologies.

As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it in a Guardian op-ed earlier in the month:

But every filtering enterprise to date is a failure and a disaster, and it’s my belief that every filtering effort we will ever field will be no less a failure and a disaster. These systems are failures because they continue to allow the bad stuff through. They’re disasters because they block mountains of good stuff. Their proponents acknowledge both these facts, but treat them as secondary to the importance of trying to do something, or being seen to be trying to do something. Secondary to the theatrical and PR value of pretending to be solving the problem.

Rather than waste time and money on pointless technical ’solutions’ to an insolvable ‘problem’, the government should just accept that this sort of literature exists and some people will read it.  Some will read it because they believe in it, and others will read it because they want to refute it.  Forcing it underground or out of the public view won’t make it go away but it will make it much harder to debunk it.  In the mean time, a lot of legitimate information will be misclassified as ‘hateful’ and ‘extremist’ and, to use the word in the article, “screened”.

It could, of course, be that some British Muslims are suffering from a particular form of Munchausen by Proxy (common even here) that compels them to seek increasingly audacious solutions to problems that don’t really exist. Or maybe it is a defensive move because they fear that it is only a matter of time before our Mufti of Australia, Ashmore Island, Cartier Island, Christmas Islands, Cocas Islands, North Keeling Island, Coral Sea Islands, Thousand Island, Heard Island, McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island, Phillip Island, Coode Island, Australian territories in Antarctica, and New Zealand has his role expanded slightly to become Mufti of the Commonwealth?

However, more likely, it is naive romanticism [pdf] about the possibility of a unified Muslim community that drives this. In other words, most of us dream of a community in which we all get along, have political power “just like the Jews” (as the cliche goes), nobody ever says anything bad about us in the media, and the wolf lives happily with the lamb. And we imagine that what is preventing us from having all that and more is that we lack a single unifying leader. In a global context, we’re waiting for the khalifah to lead us out of the quagmire, but locally we look to a mufti or similar to help us ‘unite’.

Yet, as the Australian experience suggests, the idea of a single, supreme spiritual leader behind whom all of us must line up spiritually and politically is naive and ultimately destroys unity and cohesion within our communities. In the UK, with a substantially larger Muslim community and where the stakes and potential rewards are far higher, it is likely to be even worse. Every sect, ethno-linguistic group, every tribe and every political faction will want “their man” to be in the top position. If the battles over leadership in the Australian Muslim community often resemble a group of bald men fighting over a comb, a leadership fight for an officially recognised mufti position in the United Kingdom might resemble a group of bald men on PCP armed with knives fighting over a comb inside a phone box. In other words, messy.

Meanwhile, everyone who doesn’t like Muslims can now direct their energies at one man: knock down the mufti, knock down the Muslims. The mufti thus becomes the ultimate straw man. If he doesn’t already have disagreeable views, the media will find people around him who do. A conference twenty years ago, for example, with Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi in attendance will be cast as proof of hidden anti-semitism; and the sale of books printed in Saudi Arabia at his mosque (or a mosque he once led or attended) will be cast as proof of him being a Wahabi/Saudi shill/enemy of the British publishing industry (take your pick).

Given this pressure and given no one person can represent the diverse religious or even political views of the Muslim community, there will end up being multiple figures either calling themselves ‘mufti’ or fulfilling that leadership role in each of their respective communities. And that sounds awfully similar to what we have now, doesn’t it?

And therein lies a real defect with the conventional story line about how and why religion collapsed in Western Europe. For what has not been explained, but rather assumed throughout that chain of argument, is why the causal relationship between belief and practice should always run that way instead of the other, at least some of the time. It is as if recent intellectual history had lined up all the right puzzle pieces — modernity, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking and absent families — only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but leaves something critical out.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to supply that missing piece. It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over secularization — and not as a theoretical exercise, but rather because compelling empirical evidence suggests an alternative account of what Nietzsche’s madman really saw in the “tombs” (read, the churches and cathedrals) of Europe.

In brief, it is not only possible but highly plausible that many Western European Christians did not just stop having children and families because they became secular. At least some of the time, the record suggests, they also became secular because they stopped having children and families. If this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it.

Technically I was there first and because of that, I was served first. Surprisingly, she didn’t move a single inch at the small counter, making the transaction extremely difficult. I finally asked her, politely, if she could please move a bit so that I could complete my purchase.

Heavily and slowly, she moved, but not without giving me what I can only term a look of pure and utter hatred. I was a little surprised and, although I felt slightly sick from her look, not being an overly shy type I was about to ask her what the problem was. But I didn’t. I thought it may create unnecessary fuss, and really, part of me didn’t want to know. If it escalated, it would ruin my mood and my day.

Instead, I finished the transaction and shook off the incident immediately. Past experience has taught me it’s the only way to not let it weigh on my mind.

But I didn’t completely forget it.

The issue? I wear hijab. I did feel at the time that the woman’s aggressive look was, at least in part, due to my appearance. I have no way of knowing for sure beyond my own instinct if that was indeed at the heart of it. But I’m definitely not an advocate for the victim mentality. I don’t think everyone is out to get me, nor do I think every instance of rudeness or aggression can be put down to prejudice. So I give myself enough credit to know my feelings weren’t of the knee jerk victimhood kind.

But the incident brought to mind an article (“Under siege: Muslims blame the media”, 3/5/07) I had read in The Sydney Morning Herald’s “The Face of Islam” series, which suggested Sydney’s Muslims feel more antagonised than other Australian Muslim residents, and blame it on saturated negative coverage in the media. I agree that media has been less than fair in many instances. I also believe this lack of fairness has its consequences in terms of community perceptions about Muslims.

But not for the first time I considered how much of this antagonism Sydney Muslims speak of is real and how much of it is perceived. The fact is, it happens; that’s not in question. But how much of it is, well, real? I’ve read endless stories of discrimination in the workplace and on the street. Yet, for every negative tale, I have heard more positive ones.

In the workplace, many of my friends who wear the hijab have excelled in their chosen careers, finding suitable jobs where they fit in comfortably without their religious practice suffering. And in general, those I know are similarly positive in their outlook in terms of everyday living. Smile and you’ll get a smile back.

But there are certainly instances of prejudice. For example, I didn’t imagine the time a garbage man yelled “Taliban” at me over and over as I left home for work one morning. I also didn’t imagine it when I was called an obscene term at Town Hall station nor when a bus driver looked at me as I stepped on and exclaimed in disgust, “Oh my God”, also neglecting to stop the bus at my stop and telling me I didn’t press the button (I certainly had).

My friends aren’t victimising themselves when they tell me they’ve been told, very creatively, to go home when driving, nor is the mother of two lying when she says her car’s side view mirror was smashed by another driver, who threatened it would be worse the next time.

But ultimately, we move beyond these incidents. Why? Because they’re not indicative of our overall lifestyles and interaction. We have non-Muslim friends, we’re not hidden indoors, we shop at the same shopping centres and most importantly, we all, in essence, want the same for ourselves and our families in life. We’ve been brought up in Sydney, and have an affection for that upbringing and Sydney that is rarely given airtime.

So, is it as bad as the mood suggests? And is this really Sydney’s problem? I’d be interested to know what people think, and how they perceive the situation to be for Muslims elsewhere.

Secularist Turks regard having a head-scarfed first lady in the presidential palace as a violation of the secular state.

And the military is so distressed that they are even hinting at a coup if elections were to ever deliver such a result. It’s a strange case of secularism versus democracy with the Turkish military and some section of the community clearly on the side of secularism. .

This ideology, often called Kemalism after its supposed founder, has created an authoritarian state that, in its fanatical opposition to religious symbols, has veered into the absurd. For example, as Gul Gunver, a Turkish professor, reminds us, the daughter of the presidential candidate wears a wig over her hijab in order to be allowed to attend university.

Anyway, Tariq Nelson has uncovered some photos of an earlier Turkish president and his wife. The photos are over the fold, however I must warn any Turkish secularist readers that these photos may cause severe cognitive dissonance in some people.

For those who don’t know, that’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey and the man in whose name and supposed ideology, all this is taking place. The woman with him is his wife, Lâtife Uşaklıgil. Note the absence of any wig over her hijab. Et tu, Lâtife Hanım?

One can find more photos here, here, here, here, and here.

Of course, this is hardly surprising given there is a strong incentive for such companies to, firstly, convince manufacturers that unless they are explicitly certified as halal, there products will be forbidden to Muslims; and, secondly, the legitimacy of their certification depends, to some extent, on Muslims themselves believing that such products are forbidden to them. A more efficient alternative might be to teach Muslims enough of the rules of fiqh in order to be able to assess most products for themselves.

In any case, as Muslim communities develop there is one area where Muslims could also do with halal certification: finance. Like food products, there are many financial products on offer in the market — different types of insurance, leasing structures, managed funds, etc. — but very little information on what is and what is not permissible. I have noticed that there are a number of broad assumptions about the impermissibility of particular types of transaction and product without any detailed understanding or analysis. However, it is quite possible that there are many products and transactions we consider, by default, to be haram but are actually permissible or permissible with some conditions.

For example, there is a blanket assumption that insurance is forbidden as it involves gharar (extreme uncertainty), is a form of gambling, etc. However, some Australian insurance companies such as AAMI and GIO offer a product whereby a person pays a premium and, in the event of an accident, the customer drops the vehicle off at the depot and they (the insurance company) do everything required to fix the vehicle and return it back to the customer. The actual repairs are carried out by a subcontractor and the customer never receives a cash payment; instead being provided with a service. This transaction is therefore fundamentally different to the popular understanding of insurance. Is it also haram? And what about health insurance in which the insurer subcontracts a hospital to ‘repair’ the insured?

It is surprising that our religious leaders, imams and scholars seem not to have looked at these sorts of questions despite Muslims having been in this country for many decades. Therefore, I believe that there is a significant opportunity and need for organisations to be established — similar to the halal certification bodies used with food products — that look at the various financial products, assess them and issue certifications to the providers.

Finance companies could provide the certification body with a description of their product for assessment. The certifier would examine it, present it to their shariah board, and, if it passes, publish their findings on a website and/or in a journal alongside the company’s own description. The company would pay a fee entitling them to use a particular trademark and would sign a contract promising to notify the certifier of any changes to the product and agreeing that the description provided is a fair and accurate representation of how the product actually works. This would, I believe, be attractive to a company because it requries little from them except to provide documentation such as a product disclosure statement and yet the potential benefits of reaching a hitherto unreached market may be quite significant.

The perceived absence of halal alternatives to many increasingly important financial products in this society is and will continue to be an impediment for many Muslim’s economic development. For example, all Australians are required to pay money into superannuation yet, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has assessed the various funds to determine which ones are the most appropriate for Muslims to use. It takes a lot of money, time and skill to develop new products and the organisations to deliver them. Perhaps, it makes more sense for us to look initially at the products already on offer in the market first and assess these.

I would be interested in hearing what people think about the idea of halal certification applied to financial products. Has this been attempted anywhere in the West? If so, how has it worked/failed?