A win for 'secularists' in Libya? It's not what you think.

An anti-Qaddafi fighter takes part in a demonstration in Benghazi June 7 to demand the application of Islamic law, or sharia, in Libya. Op-ed contributor Amyn B. Sajoo says: 'That Islam and rights can coexist in the minds of so many Muslims is a hard lesson for those clinging to stereotypes.... There is a price to pay for the lazy assumption that tolerance and pluralism are strictly secular virtues.' 

Πηγή: CSM

By Amyn B. Sajoo
July 19 2012

This week, so-called 'secularists' were declared official winners in Libya's parliamentary elections – and yet they support a constitutional place for Islamic sharia values. This seeming contradiction in Libya belies Western stereotypes about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy.

Official results for parliamentary elections released in Libya this week show the winners to be the so-called “secularists” – the National Forces Alliance. This group has led the interim government in Tripoli since last year’s revolution toppled Muammar Qaddafi.

The outcome seems to run counter to the rise of Islamism in the Arab Spring. Or does it?

True, Mahmoud Jibril, the alliance’s leader, is a US-trained political scientist who did much to garner Western support for the Libyan uprising. Yet one of the first public pronouncements of the newly-elected National Forces Alliance was to disavow the “secular liberal” label that the mainstream media have eagerly bestowed on them – and affirm a constitutional place for Islamic sharia values.

This seeming contradiction in Libya belies Western stereotypes about the incompatibility of Islam and democracy – that a constitutional role for religion in public life can only curtail individual freedoms, especially for women and minorities. That is not how many Muslims think.

Consider, for instance, a Gallup report released last month. Polling focused on sharia and gender and was taken after the Arab Spring. Islamists had electoral successes in Egypt and Tunisia, and strong majorities of both women and men in those countries – as well as in Libya and Yemen – want sharia as a source of law. Men and women in Syria are less enthusiastic, though 49 percent of both still favor at least some influence ofsharia on law. In Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, many people favor it as the only source of legislation.

Perhaps more surprising to outsiders: Men who regard themselves as “religious” are more willing to recognize a woman’s right to divorce than those who aren’t. Robust majorities support equal rights for women. Bahrain, which has yet to embrace democracy, leads the pack, with 94 percent of women and 87 percent of men endorsing gender equality.

That Islam and rights can coexist in the minds of so many Muslims is a hard lesson for those clinging to stereotypes. They will insist that the road to equal citizenship – especially for women and minorities – rests on a firmly secular constitutionalism. After all, wasn’t that the global map of political modernity? Aren’t liberalism and human rights about putting religion in its private zone?

Indeed, most of the Middle East became officially secular after European colonial rule. Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen had socialist governments much like Egypt under Nasser, with little time for religion. Tunisia had a secular political history comparable to Turkey’s.

Women enjoyed explicit guarantees of equal status under those constitutions. So in many cases did minorities such as Coptic Christians and Jews. Women and minorities became part of the ideological profile of autocratic states that were otherwise illiberal. But the basis for these rights had everything to do with political expediency, and little to do with pluralist citizenship.

How easily we forget that in the West, civic liberalism was preceded by the Protestant Reformation. The liberalization of Christian theology and its daily interface with ordinary folk ushered in secular politics. But that did not mean Christianity stopped influencing politics.

In the late-20th century, crucial breakthroughs on civil rights came through Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblicaly inspired ethos. Today, shifts in church doctrine on abortion, contraception, euthanasia, gender, and same-sex relations still shape civic space.

Conversely, the failure to liberalize religious traditions can put the brakes on civic culture.

South Africa’s Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church played a key role in supplying the political theology of apartheid. Post-colonial India’s official liberalism collided with a caste system that claimed a Hindu theological basis; that was why Gandhi strove to “recast” that theology.

The road to inclusive civic politics after the Arab Spring runs through the gates of a pluralism that’s validated and supported by religion. The antidote to Al Qaeda and Salafi extremism isn’t an escape from Islam, which is hardly feasible or democratic. It’s a deeper appreciation of a Muslim heritage that belies the bigoted readings of sharia on which those groups base their tribal honor codes.

That heritage is one where the arts, medicine, philosophy, and politics flourished when hard orthodoxy did not. Cairo was born in the 10th century synthesis of a Shiite minority dynasty, the Fatimids, and a Sunni-Jewish-Christian populace; it fostered a world-class cosmopolitan empire that was a match for the Mughals in India and the Ottomans in Turkey.

There is a price to pay for the lazy assumption that tolerance and pluralism are strictly secular virtues. The civil war in Syria, for instance, reflects the folly of such thinking. After half a century of official secularism, the minority Alawites (who are Shiite Muslims) dread their fate under a Sunni Muslim majority.

The answer to such intolerance lies much more in religious liberalization, a process that will take time. Nothing short of the retrieval of pluralist values nurtured in often deeply convivial Muslim relations with each other and with the world’s other great traditions will serve as the basis for inclusive and accountable citizenship today.

It’s a quest in which educators, imams, mosques, the media, and civic organizations have a vital role – including in the West, beyond our post-9/11 phobias and illusions.

Amyn B. Sajoo lectures in the history and politics of the Muslim world at Simon Fraser University. His books include "Muslim Ethics: Emerging Vistas" and "Muslim Modernities: Expressions of the Civil Imagination."

Turkey Turning to the East

Πηγή: The Harvard Crimson
By SEMRA E. SEVI

Noev 1 2011

With Turkey’s prospects for joining the European Union stagnating, the country is reaching out to Muslim and Arab countries as an alternate form of political and economic support. In this light, Turkey can serve as a role model for the Muslim world and for neighboring Arab countries. Although Turkey is not without its problems, it is unique in being a secular, Islamic democratic nation that should set its own course, without looking to the European Union.

Motivated to join the E.U. for decades, Turkey has implemented many democratic reforms to meet the acceptance criteria. Since 2000, the country has passed a plethora of modernization laws to meet the level of international standards, including laws abolishing the death penalty and the reforming of human rights.

Additionally, Turkey has eased its authoritarian restrictions on freedom of expression and the press, while recognizing some minority rights. While all of these improvements represent moves in the right direction, other problems still plague the Kemalist-turned-Erdoganist republic. To take one, ethnic tensions involving the Kurdish and Armenian communities remain, a testament to the current government’s shortcomings.

Despite Turkey’s clear ambition to enter the E.U., Europe’s Christian-majority countries have repeatedly shunned the largest Muslim European country with chapter after chapter of new rules for entry.

These same E.U. gatekeepers now seem to worry that Turkey is turning away from Europe after many decades of implementing social and cultural reforms. Having kept Turkey out of the European Union for so long, one might ask: Is the West justified in complaining? I don’t think so.

The E.U.’s continuous rejection of Turkey is in line with an anti-Muslim attitude spreading across Europe. This can be seen in France’s and Switzerland’s recent bans of the headscarf (Switzerland’s ban still must be approved by the upper chamber of parliament), and Germany’s (former) longtime denial of citizenship to Turkish immigrants—many of them second or third generation Germans.

These countries have been extremely intolerant toward their Muslim minorities. While many Germans indict Turks for not integrating into their culture and society, until 1999 they also denied Turks born in Germany the right of German citizenship by birth, due to the fact that they were not ethnically German. Many Turks in Germany have complained of the difficultiesof living between two worlds, speaking of a feeling of being unwanted.

In an essay titled The Fading Dream of Europe, Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel laureate in literature and arguably one of Turkey’s most controversial figures, describes his upbringing in a country that dreamt of entering Europe. Pamuk notes that the dream is fading fast, although no one is willing to admit that Turkey’s hopes of joining the E.U. are nearly lost.

The likelihood of Turkey ever making it is so slim that any discussion on this subject is futile. Turkey’s identity crisis between the East and West is still as prevalent as it was centuries before when it served as a bridge between civilizations. While the country has a foothold in Europe, it is not European at its core.

Possibly due to the onerous hurdles it has faced in its journey to formally join the E.U., Turkey has slowly turned to Islam. The current diplomatic standoff between Turkey and Israel, once an ally, has reached an intensity never before experienced between the two countries, after Israel refused to apologize for killing eight Turkish civilians aboard a Turkish flotilla to Gaza in May 2010. Turkey has since responded by downgrading diplomatic and military ties with the Jewish state and expelling the Israeli ambassador from Ankara.

Furthermore, Turkey has supported the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya while defending the Palestinians’ rights in their bid for statehood in the United Nations. This has many asking if Turkey, once seen as a bridge between the East and West, is a secular Muslim democracy turning religious and Eastwards?

Culturally, today’s Turkey is closer to its Arab counterparts than its European ones. Moreover, it stands as proof that democracy and Islam are compatible. Turkey should not abandon the Western facets of its identity, even though there seems to be no point in continuing in the endless negotiations to join the remnants of Europe’s other empires in the E.U. Rather it should set its own course and stand as a role model for the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Semra E. Sevi is a political science concentrator at the University of Toronto.

14 killed as Filipino troops clash with militants

Πηγή: msnbc
By AP
Sep. 25 2011

MANILA, Philippines — Suspected Muslim militants attacked government troops guarding a school construction site in a rebel stronghold in the southern Philippines on Sunday, igniting a clash that killed 12 gunmen and two soldiers, a marine commander said.

About 50 gunmen attacked a marine detachment in hilly Talipao town in Sulu province at dawn, setting off two hours of fierce fighting that killed 12 suspected militants and two soldiers, marine commander Col. Romeo Tanalgo said. Six other military personnel were wounded before the gunmen split and withdrew into the forest, he said.

It was not immediately clear if the attackers belonged to the notoriously violent Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaida-linked group regarded as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the Philippines. A larger Islamic rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, has a presence in the impoverished, far-flung community.

Government troops recovered seven rebel firearms at the scene of the fighting and were checking if there were more bodies of slain gunmen in the area. Reinforcement troops were pursuing the fleeting militants, Tanalgo said.

Washington has blacklisted the Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organization, blaming it for many bomb attacks, kidnappings for ransom and beheadings. The militants have attacked and killed American citizens in the past.

The Moro National Liberation Front signed a peace accord with the government in 1996 after it dropped its secessionist bid and settled for limited Muslim autonomy in the south, homeland of minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines.

Most of the Moro rebels, however, did not lay down their arms and now complain that the Philippine government reneged on many political and economic promises under the 1996 pact. They have occasionally been blamed for launching attacks against government forces and have been suspected of harboring Abu Sayyaf militants in Sulu, about 610 miles (980 kilometers) south of the capital, Manila.