Political Islam - curators... Leave religion out of it. A new understanding of the Middle East. There are multiple reasons for looking beyond Islam for our comprehension of this tumultuous region, to culture, to politics, and also to the history of capitalism, foreign interference and domination – its winners and losers.
Our reviewer of Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East, by openDemocracy author Sami Zubaida, is drawn to a conclusion regarding having one’s pudding and eating it Published while the ‘Arab spring’ was spreading beyond Tunisia and Egypt, Beyond Islam provides more than a coherent answer to the questions raised by a public surprised to see that recent effective large-scale popular mobilization in largely Muslim countries has been neither initiated nor dominated by Islamists, nor primarily expressed in religious terms. Certainly, everybody saw the Muslim Brothers join the Egyptian protests after days of hesitation, numerous people praying in public in Tahrir Square, and Muslim preachers and Christian priests jointly addressing the crowds. Sami Zubaida — Department of Politics, Birkbeck.
Critical Muslims: RELIGION, FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, AND ITS DISCONTENTS. Whereas the Qantara website used the anniversary of 9/11 as an opportunity to assess the progress in democratizing the Muslim world, in the very same week a YouTube clip of an obscure, badly edited and poorly acted alleged parody of the Prophet Muhammad led to virulent reactions in a number of countries in North Africa and the Middle East against perceived anti-Islamist conspiracies orchestrated by the West.
The essay The End of the "Anti-Thesis" argues that 'After a decade, 9/11 is over. Its main legacy – the idea that Islam is fundamentally opposed to Western democratic values – has finally lost its power of persuasion. What is making this antithesis untenable is the Arab Spring, which is revealing rather different sides to both Muslims and what the West has stood for in the past'.
It surveys the rise of Islamophobia fed by rightist politicians in Europe and debates among academics on promoting national culture and the extent to which foreign contributions must be recognized:
Salafism in the Middle East. "Islam" and "Democracy" in the Arab World. Political Islam - Reading... Hirsi Ali, Berman, and Ramadan on Islam. Was the prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant?
Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular Enlightenment? Should Muslims consider converting to Christianity? For the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!” Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America.
She is not hopeful that Americans will heed her warning. Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West.