Fighting for the Soul of Islam

There is an interesting article in U.S. News & World Report. Here is an excerpt and link:

In St. Petersburg, the Secular Islam Summit, sponsored by a humanist organization called the Center for Inquiry, featured Muslim speakers who ranged from angry ex-believers to devout reformers. They differed sharply on particulars, but all shared the conviction that Islam must be compatible with secular democracy. Their closing manifesto, “The St. Petersburg Declaration,” affirmed the separation of mosque and state, gender equality in personal and family law, and unrestricted critical study of Islamic traditions.

On the same weekend, the south Florida office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held its conference in Fort Lauderdale. Among its speakers, Geneive Abdo, a Lebanese-American (of Christian background) and author of Mecca and Main Street, discussed how young American Muslims have been strengthening their Islamic identity since 9/11.

At least as significant as the meetings themselves, however, were the denunciations hurled back and forth by attendees of the separate events. Repeatedly, speakers in St. Petersburg denounced CAIR as typifying fellow-traveling Islamism. Absorbed with grievance-group politics and hypersensitive to any criticism of Muslims, it receives, various speakers noted, generous funding from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. More disturbingly, as many in St. Petersburg pointed out, some CAIR officials have refused to denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, while others have been too quick to declare who is, or who is not, a true Muslim.

Playing to type, the executive director of the Tampa chapter of CAIR, Ahmed Bedier, dismissed the St. Petersburg crowd as a bunch of “atheists and non-Muslims” with no standing in the Muslim community. Later, in the Washington Post, Abdo observed that despite the attention western media lavish on secularized Muslims, they represent only a small minority. By contrast, those Muslims associated with CAIR, she wrote, “more closely reflect the views of the majority not only in the United States, but worldwide.”

Law of the land.

And what does this majority want? Well, for one, Abdo explained, the implementation of Islamic sharia law as the law of the land for Muslim countries and even the restricted use of sharia within some western countries. Abdo concluded that Muslims living in the West are unlikely to be fully integrated into their societies, while nations in the Muslim world are likely to be “much more Islamic than western.”

I offer that even the limited implementation of sharia law or any other religious law in America would be contrary to the establishment clause of our Constitution and principles upon which our nation was founded.

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