Religion: Muslim clerics refuse to bury Mumbai attackers

Yes, they did refuse.

This refusal to bury the Mumbai attackers is different. It is an original and bold protest against Islamist violence by religious authorities who would normally make sure any Muslim got a proper burial. “This is symbolically very important,” Mustafa Akyol, a columnist for the Hürriyet Daily News in Istanbul and an active Muslim blogger. "I’ve heard of imams declining to lead a prayer for the deceased because he was an outright atheist, but never of people being denied burial."

My friend Mustafa has expressed his own grief over the Mumbai horror as well.

Now, obviously at a certain point, the bodies of the dead - however they died - must be returned to the Earth from whose elements they took their substance and from whose forms they took their shape. Their souls return to the One who created them, and we can only pray about that, as best we know how.

But I am glad to see Muslim clerics speaking out against allowing terrorists and their supporters to define their religion - and their relationship to the rest of the world.

From Tom Denaghan's December 3 Reuters story, we also learn

By the way, this decision did not come out of the blue. Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, one of India’s leading Islamic groups, endorsed a fatwa against terrorism in early November. More than 6,000 clerics signed the edict, which follows a similar one issued in February by India’s top Islamic seminary, Darul Uloom Deoband.

More by and/or about Mustafa Akyol here.

Religion and politics: What does new, more religious government in Turkey portend?

Not necessarily what you might think, says Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of the Turkish daily News. Here's Akyol, advising against jumping to conclusions about Turkey's new leader:

Mr. Gul is a practicing Muslim, and his similarly devout wife, Hayrunnisa Gul, wears the Islamic headscarf. Hence some people wonder whether this God-fearing First Couple symbolizes a setback in Turkey's two-century-old quest for modernization.

Akyol explains,

Mr. Gul soon found a chance to discover the virtues of the modern West during the two years he spent in London and Exeter for postgraduate studies. As he recalled in a recent interview, he was deeply impressed by the openness, tolerance and pluralism of British society. A most notable experience was the pastor who kindly invited him to perform his daily prayers in the university chapel. He realized the problem in Turkey, the authoritarian secularism that disallowed his wife's education because of her headscarf, did not stem from Western-style democracy, but the lack thereof.

In 1991 Mr. Gul joined the Islamist Welfare Party, but never shared the anti-Western and anti-Semitic demagoguery of its leader, Necmeddin Erbakan.

In the late '90s, Mr. Gul and the likeminded, including the charismatic Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdogan, formed the "reformist" movement in Welfare, and soon broke with it to found the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in 2001. The party emerged as, and still is, the champion of free markets, liberal reforms and Turkey's effort to join the European Union.

Well, if the ejection device for Islamic extremists is in good working order, this sounds like a plan.

Freedom of religion: One benefit is more piety

My friend Mustafa Akyol discusses religion in Malaysia here in "Islam, apostasy, and 'Erdoganists' in Malaysia."

... what happens if a Malay wants to change his religion, and become, say, a Christian?

What happens is a big problem. The ex-Muslim is required to take "permission" from the Islamic Sharia courts to convert. But since he or she is not a Muslim anymore, that is absurd. Moreover, the courts are generally not willing to give permission. The consequential limbo can last for a long time. Moreover, the same courts do not allow a Muslim Malay (which is a redundant term, actually) to marry a non-Muslim.

Since I learned a little bit about this problem, I decided to address the issue of apostasy at the speech I gave last Tuesday at a public panel on "the role of religion in a plural society." First, I argued that a secular (not secularist!) Political system is the best option for Muslims, because it allows them to practice their faith freely, without any compulsion from state. In return, I noted, Muslims should not exert compulsion on others, too. The latter idea included granting people freedom from Islam, even if they decide to leave it. And what would we achieve after all, keeping people in the faith by force other than hypocrisy?

Yes, exactly.

Look, I am a Roman Catholic. I could probably get 90 percent of people in the world to agree to become Roman Catholics by grabbing a pistol and offering to shoot them through the head if they didn't. So what would that mean?

It would mean that the definition of Roman Catholic becomes: "I don't want to get shot through the head."

Hmmm. We Catholics used to have a more intellectually detailed faith than that. We are the heirs not only of Aquinas, but of Aristotle and Plato, and of the Hebrew Prophets, as well as the New Testament and the tradition that followed. A traditional of rational thought and spiritual inspiration, and of the many witnesses to the power of God to change lives.

Anyway, I wrote a note to Mustafa, saying,

“And what would we achieve, after all, keeping people in the faith by force other than hypocrisy?”

Beautifully put, Mustafa!

The key reason for promoting religious freedom is to benefit religion.

We have long understood this in North America.

Europeans often criticize us here for being “too religious.”

Yet consider! We do NOT have state churches, as they do. We have strict separation of church and state – but primarily to protect the church, not the state.

When the church and the state are too closely involved, the church is expected to “bless” all kinds of essentially political projects that may be good or bad - but are not part of the church’s mission.

Fact: Left to ourselves, we turn to God. And no, we are not hypocrites. We really do believe it - as the Europeans constantly complain.

That’s what they most dislike about us. We really do believe it.

Anybody is allowed to bang on doors here in Toronto and evangelize on behalf of any religion, including weird ones, and believe me, they do.

When I point out politely that I am a Roman Catholic and am busy, they just go bang on the next door.

The level of religiously inspired violence is very low here, because no religion would be allowed an enforcement squad.

So, based on historical experience in North America, I entirely agree with my friend Mustafa that freedom of religion in a secular (but not "secularist"*) environment actually leads to more genuine piety in the long run.

*secularist - I abhor the French government's notion that Muslim girls cannot wear scarves if they want. I do not see why a girl should not be permitted to dress in any non-provocative way she wants, and of course she must not dress in a way that conceals her identity. (Of course, if she is a student or employee, she must wear the required uniform, but usually that means more clothes, not fewer - and it can be made consistent with a religious tradition, in a tasteful way.)

Naturally, I was interested, because The Spiritual Brain is being translated into Bahasa Meliyu (the Malaysian language).

Fitna: Thoughtful Muslim reacts to the challenges

Recently, my Muslim journalist friend Mustafa Akyol (Turkey) saw Fitna, which addresses the worldview of Islamic political extremists. The film is causing angst in the world's nanny states about possible outrage among dial-a-mobs, but I am glad to say that rioting has largely fizzled.

I really appreciated Mustafa's thoughtful comments in Turkish Daily News, of which I have excerpted a few. Arguing against legal action - or overreaction generally - to the film, he says,

The film actually does not lie or cheat. Such violent or angry Muslims do exist, and so do the belligerent passages in the Koran. What the film does is to cherry-pick them. There are also many messages of tolerance, compassion, and peace in the Koran. Using the same method of purposeful selection, one could also make a movie titled “Islamic Agape,” which would include the scenes of smiling Muslims and benevolent verses.

Moreover, one can use “Fitna”s selective method to propagate against most other religions – such as, say, Judaism. Actually if you focus on the radical groups among the Jewish settlers in Israel, you can find a very similar language of hatred, and even acts of terrorism such as the mosque massacre perpetrated by Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in 1994. It is also remarkable that such fringe Jewish fundamentalists, like the followers of the late radical Rabbi Meir David Kahane, use passages from the Hebrew Bible in order to justify, and even amplify, their fervor.

Actually certain parts of the Old Testament, and most notably the Book of Joshua, would overshadow any sura (chapter) of the Koran in terms of militancy. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews know that the Book of Joshua, which tells the war of the Israelites against the pagan Canaanites, is a historical record which does not address today’s realities. Similarly, when they read Koran’s chapters about Prophet Muhammad’s war with pagan Arabs, most Muslims regard them as historical anecdotes. But a worrying number of Muslims, such as the ones that “Fitna” has captured, think differently.

Why are worrying numbers of Muslims listening to radicals?

What makes them believe in a scripture-driven militancy is the same thing that influences radical Jewish settlers: They are in a sociopolitical context which radicalizes them. They believe that their values, identities and very lives of their children are in danger – and they conclude they are fighting the same existential war that Joshua or Muhammad fought centuries ago.

Mustafa thinks that stabilization and modernization of Muslim societies will discredit Muslim radicals. Historically, these forces have usually worked that way. For example, Karl Marx was convinced that British workers would be the first to embrace his communism. In fact, they never did. Britain was both a stable enough country that dialogue was possible and a modern enough country that life was improving for most people anyway. So workers settled for unions and shorter working hours (and pubs, telly, and National Health, of course). Communism was forced on populations that couldn't really choose, in the aftermath of World War II - and thrown off almost worldwide in 1988.

People who think the world is in turmoil now are usually not old enough to remember the 1940s. (I don't remember, but I did grow up in the shadow of World War II, and heard the stories, far into the night, of people who did remember pretty clearly.)

As a traditional Catholic Christian, I identify with Mustafa's approach. For example, I often hear attacks, insults, and put-downs of the Catholic Church - which happens to be the oldest and possibly the largest voluntary association on Earth. So at any given time, detractors always find something to trash somewhere. On the off chance that they should come up short in the present, they can always look to the wealth of past misdeeds or prophesy our future doom. And so? So what exactly?

And while we are here: Dial-a-mob/rent-a-riot behaviour is NOT copyright to Middle Eastern Muslims. I ran into the same thing among the American Ivy League elite in May 2005, when the New York Times bungled a story I broke on my other blog, The Post-Darwinist, claiming that a film about to be shown at the Smithsonian was "anti-evolution." It wasn't; it did not even address the subject. But zillions of Darwinbots, as I called them, behaved exactly as if it had. It's a good thing that no one gives them sharp objects to play with.

Secularism: Early postmortem results

Dinesh D'Souza notes, about this year's Templeton winner Charles Taylor,

I wish I could read Taylor’s forthcoming book on secularism now, since I am in the process of finishing my new book What’s So Great About Christianity , out from Regnery in October. But Taylor’s A Secular Age is not out until September. This is Taylor’s eagerly-awaited study of how we came to live in a secular age. At one time virtually all of the orbit of life in the West was shaped by religion and specifically Christianity. But now we live in a time and place where our political, economic, scientific and cultural activities are largely removed from the sphere of religion. I want to learn from Taylor what we have gained and what we have lost, and whether it is possible to retrieve some things that have been hastily left behind.

D'Souza is the political scientist who has unsettled a lot of people by pointing out, along with journalist Mustafa Akyol, that the reason that radicalized Islamic extremists make converts among traditional Muslims is not that the traditional Muslims hate Christians but because they despise the spiritual bankruptcy of current Western culture. Thus they can be recruited to jihad.

Akyol, for his part, offers an insightful look into the clash between secularist democrats and Muslim democrats in Turkey. He warns against taking too seriously the legacy media myth that the secularists are pro-democracy and the believers are anti-democracy. It was never nearly that simple in Turkey. For example, he notes,

... the late Ottoman Empire had a very sophisticated intellectual elite. Most of the Ottoman intelligentsia spoke English and French, and they were very well versed in European thought, not to mention the Islamic tradition. Among them were different trends, but to generalize, we can speak of two main camps. One of these was what I call the “modernization within the tradition” camp. Its proponents realized the need for reforms, but were hoping to realize these without abandoning traditional values, and especially the religious ones.

The second trend was what I call the “modernization despite the tradition” folks. Their most radical representative was the secular fundamentalist Abdullah Cevdet, who thought Turks could only save themselves if they abandoned their religion. His distaste with traditional values reached a level of deep self-hatred. As a believer in Social Darwinism, he once argued that Turkish women should be bred with men from the “superior races” of Europe to ensure “biological progress.” He is still remembered with deep disgust among Turkey's conservatives.

and

In other words, Islamism arose in Turkey not because its Islamic tradition was prone to it. No. It arose because its secular fundamentalists kept on suppressing even the most moderate and progressive expressions of religion.

And the bad news for today is that they are craving do the same thing again.

The current secularist hype in Turkey, which goes hysterical in the face of any sign of religiosity in society, is a very dangerous political force that might, once again, crush Turkish democracy and prevent the cultivation of a truly modern, moderate and yet still devout Muslim identity.

Compared with most ideas for organizing society, secularism was demonstrably weaker at resisting the deconstruction of all values, whether functional or not, because it was simply a negative phenomenon. There was not much behind it to form a resistance. If Turkish Muslims adopt simple secularism, they will not end up spending their Fridays communing with art or nature but shopping (or worse).

Secular fundamentalism: As big a threat as the other kind?

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish Muslim commentator, reflects on secular "fundamentalism." That sort of thing, typefied in North America by the recent spate of "anti-God" books, has been a particular scourge in Turkey:

It is no secret that Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to democracy, freedom and security in today's world, especially in the Middle East. Yet the same values can be threatened by secular fundamentalists, too. Turkey's self-styled laïcité, a much more radical version of the French secular system, is a case in point.

The American model of secularism guarantees individual religious liberty. The Turkish model, however, guarantees the state's right to dominate religion and suppress religious practice in any way it deems necessary.

One result has been a renewed interest on the part of many sincere Muslims in civil liberties:

Noting that Western democracies give their citizens the very religious freedoms Turkey has denied its own, Muslims of the AK party have rerouted their search for freedom. Rather than trying to Islamize the state, they have decided to liberalize it. That's why in today's Turkey the AK party is the main proponent of the effort to join the European Union, democratization, free markets and individual liberties.

It sounds like a very interesting religious and political situation, and no one explains it better than Akyol.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Do believers in other religions go to hell, Muslim asks?

My friend Mustafa Akyol muses in Turkish Daily News, "Will Non-Muslims Go to Heaven, Too?" (October 11, 2008). He explains,

Is there any chance to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, when it comes to divine grace?

As a Muslim, I have always thought so, and I have a good reason for it: There are verses in the Koran which explicitly say that all people who believe in God and do good things will be saved. Here is, for example, verse 62 of the second sura, i.e., chapter:

“Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the last day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord, and there is no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.”

The “Sabians” noted in this verse were a south Mesopotamian group which professed some sort of monotheism. From that point on, some Koranic commentators have concluded that the God demands only monotheism and “being good” for eternal salvation. But interestingly, this ecumenical interpretation is not what all Muslims are comfortable with.

It strikes me that this is a good discussion for modern Muslims to be having.

Obviously, different religions teach different things, and they cannot all be right on the disputed points.

But the critical question is, can we respect each other enough to think that the followers of other religions are not necessarily predestined for hell? There is, after all, a critical difference between being mistaken and being evil. For one thing, opposing mistakes is sometimes a duty but opposing evil always is.

Religious tolerance is usually associated with high levels of social development. One reason, I suppose, is that it encourages people to make the case for their own view but relieves them of any duty to forcibly suppress error, which creates a number of bad social effects. Serious error usually confutes itself anyway, in my experience.

I sent Mustafa a note, commenting on the Catholic view, so far as I understand it:

Catholics believe that, in general, people cannot be damned except by their own choice. But if they have persistently lived contrary to God’s will, they may take a long time to be perfected before they can enter Heaven. This is called Purgatory.

Purgatory is thought to exist because no evil can live in God’s presence; it would be instantly destroyed. So people must be perfect before they can live in God’s presence.

Salvation is not a question of what one believes, but of the disposition of one’s heart, to move toward God or away from him. (Obviously one must believe something that brings one closer to God, but it is not articles of faith by themselves that save anyone. God himself saves us.)

In one of Jesus’ parables, there are two brothers, whose father tells them to go work in the vineyard. One of them says yes – but doesn’t. The other says no – but does. Jesus asked the crowd, “Which son obeyed his father?” That, I think, is the basic idea.

Politics, religion, and civil rights - a teetering balance worldwide

Recently, I wrote about my friend Mustafa Akyol’s response to the controversial film Fitna. Another reader, Mohammed, notes that Fitna’s renditions of the Koran are not very accurate, according to a scholar to whom he directs my attention.

I’m no Arabist, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Atheist authors often quote the Bible out of context, ignoring the history, and I suppose that many can play at that game, and use the Koran too.

To show how complex real life is, Ezra Levant, the Jewish lawyer who is fighting for free speech in Canada, says that he prefers the Canadian Muslim Congress to the Canadian Jewish Congress on this key issue. (You would have to live here to understand in detail, but basically, Canadian leftists ally with politicized Islamists to undermine free speech - the two groups have nothing in common expect their disdain for things like free speech. And groups that lean left tend to buy into the package, without considering the big picture.)

While we’re here, here’s Mustafa’s contribution, along with that of a number of other thinkers, to a symposium on Turkey’s future:

First of all, Turkey’s secularism is one of a kind, and it has almost no resemblance to the separation of church and state in the United States. In Turkey, secularism means that the state can dominate and control religion. Secularism protects only the state, in other words, not religion.
Turkey’s secularist establishment even speaks of the need to protect the society from religion. “The secularism principle,” Turkey’s Constitutional Court argued in a 1989 decision, “requires that the society should be kept away from thoughts and judgments that are not based on science and reason.” (This is also quoted in the indictment against the AKP.)

Turkey’s secularists abhor “moderate Islam” as much as radical Islam. Indeed, they see any sort of religious influence on society as a threat to “modernity.” According to Princeton historian Sükrü Hanioglu, the extreme secularism of the Turkish Republic is rooted in the “vulgar materialism” of late-19th-century Germany, which heralded a post-religious age of “science and reason.” This philosophy, which was emulated by some of the Young Turks and was inherited by most of their republican successors, has become the cornerstone of the official state ideology. That ideology, often called “Kemalism,” also includes a very staunch nationalism, a belief in a protected and state-regulated economy, and, as foreign visitors to Turkey will notice, a cult of personality created around the county’s founder, Kemal Atatürk.

This ideology tolerates no “deviation,” and therefore political parties in Turkey need not be “Islamist” to clash with the secularist establishment.

Yes! Many people worldwide do not understand that secularism in North America has NOT historically been the same thing as “laicisme” (routinely translated as “secularism”) in France or Kemalism in Turkey.

Secularism in North America has - at least historically - meant that church and state were separated for the benefit of both. Separation of church and state means, among other things, that the government is not supposed to dictate to religious bodies what they should think, say, or do beyond protecting the basic civil rights of members of a religious organization.

Unfortunately, in the wake of globalization, there are dark hints that the less benign French approach may be gaining ground in North America, and we can all only hope that reason will prevail in Turkey.

Atheism losing confidence, credibility?

Dinesh D'Souza, an all-in-one toolkit against atheism and/or nihilism, comments:

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science. It is perhaps no surprise that several leading atheists—from biologist Richard Dawkins to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker to physicist Victor Stenger—are also leading scientists. The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Humanist groups in America have launched a similar campaign in the nation’s capital. “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.” And in Colorado atheists are sporting billboards apparently inspired by John Lennon: “Imagine…no religion.”

Well, my Turkish journalist friend Mustafa Akyol - doubtless as bored as I am with all that stuff - has responded,

There is a God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.

... we have to ask whether man is happier when he feels free from responsibility or when he takes on responsibilities that he willingly fulfills. I would place my bet on the latter. Therefore, I have to turn down the kind suggestion to "stop worrying and enjoy life" that atheists are spreading around. If I were an atheist, I would rather sit down, reflect about the meaninglessness and the inevitable tragic end of all my existence, and descend pessimistically into nihilism. I am rather happy because I am convinced that life has a meaning and death is not the end - and that there is a God.

Life is often a tragedy, but seldom a mere farce.

Turkey and non-liberal secularism

My Turkish friend and colleague Mustafa Akyol interprets Turkey's tangled politics with a clarity beyond praise.

Turkey deserves close attention because there secularism is not in the least liberal.

Although the AKP has been in power since 2002 and has carried out a very successful program of political and economic liberalism--in the classic sense--Turkey’s staunchly secular establishment never fully trusted the party that had (?) started as a liberal offshoot of a more radical Muslim thinking. Thus while the AKP leaders defined themselves as “conservatives,” Turkey’s secularists continue calling them “Islamist,” a label designed to tarnish their image, at home and abroad, as some Taliban-style Muslim totalitarians. Therefore the political battle in Turkey, which reached its tipping point when Turkish generals issued a harsh “secularism memorandum” on the night of April 27, has commonly been defined as a power struggle between “Islamists” and “secularists.” And for the uninitiated foreigner, it was easy to presume that the former is bigoted and xenophobic, and the latter is open-minded and pro-Western.

Yet the true picture is exactly the opposite. While the AKP is a strong proponent of free markets, civil liberties and Turkey’s European Union bid, the secularist opposition, led by the People’s Republican Party, rejects all these objectives. The secularists actually think that most of the liberal reforms the AKP has spearheaded during the EU process are in fact part of a plot cooked up by Western “imperialists” designed to dilute Turkey’s national sovereignty. A series of recent bestsellers by a die-hard secular conspiracy theorist, Ergun Poyraz, is a good indicator of this zeitgeist. His “investigative” books paranoidly argue that the AKP leaders--and their headscarved wives--are in fact crypto-Jews who collaborate with the “Elders of Zion” to destroy Turkey’s secular system.

The correct way of interpreting Turkey’s power struggle would be in fact to define it as a conflict between liberal Muslims and illiberal secularists.

Of course, it's not really that hard to understand. Secularists are never liberal when they see no advantage to themselves from freedom of thought, or conscience, of markets, of the press, or whatever. If they are materialists, they do not in fact believe that there is even a divine spark in their fellow humans that must not be snuffed out.

Religion and politics?: Generally, it all becomes politics

One of my Muslim friends, Mustafa Akyol, describes what happens when politicians try to start churches:

Perhaps the symbolism on the front wall of the church is meaningful. Above the small sized cross, lies a huge poster of Atatürk superimposed on the red and white Turkish flag. In the room beneath, there is another poster of Atatürk with a controversial quote: “When the homeland is in question, everything else is trivial.” This slogan, attributed to the Great Leader, has recently become the battle cry of ultra-nationalists, who say that Turkey is in danger, and thus all other values, such as democracy, human rights and freedoms are secondary. Apparently those trivialities include even the real great leader that a real church must be dedicated to — Jesus Christ.

And this politician wasn't even a Christian, but he did have a use for a church in his campaign machinery ... .