Good News

In The Muslim World, A Few Brave Souls Speak Out

July 2008

Muslim Voices of Sanity and Decency Condemn The Aims and acts of Islamists

By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com

Because it's the bad news that grabs the lion's share of the reader's attention in the pages of CoverUps, it's easy to come away feeling overwhelmed by a sense of a world gone mad. It therefore becomes all the more important to point out, at least some of the time, the occasional silver linings to remind us that all is not lost in the affairs of the world. This article is a silver lining.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) draws our attention to the writings of a relative handful of commentators in the Middle East who are standing up to the Islamists in print and condemning them for their terrorist acts and the dreadful damage they are doing to Islam. They are eloquent and stirring to read – and deserve our deepest respect and support.

Writing in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa, in an article titled "Muslims Against Islam," Kuwaiti liberal Dr. Ahmad Al-Baghdadi writes:

In most countries around the world, Muslims broke into Danish Embassies, setting fire to them, and called for a ban on Danish imports... They have also launched a satellite TV channel and organized various committees and institutions, with the sole purpose of defending the Prophet [Muhammad] and the Islamic religion... Have the Muslims ever taken account of the tremendous iniquities they themselves have committed and are still committing against Islam [within and outside] the Islamic countries?

On the liberal website Aafaq.org (Google translation) the Egyptian writer Ahmad Al-Aswani boldly takes extremist Muslims to task for sullying the image of the Prophet Muhammad:

The ones who harm the Prophet are those who butcher and bomb innocents all over the world, from New York to Madrid, London, Bali, Riyadh and Cairo, Kabul and Baghdad - while invoking Allah and the Prophet under the banner of Islamic jihad...

Among those who harm the Prophet are the likes of Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who incites to the murder of Jewish children in their mothers' wombs (e.g. in a 1996 lecture to the Egyptian journalists association) and to suicide operations, as well as those who cause the death of innocent victims by declaring jihad in Iraq in the name of religion and the Prophet.

And in the Bahraini daily Akhbar Al-Khaleej, Bahraini columnist Abdallah Al-Ayoubi condemns Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, which have done far more harm to the image of Muslims around the world than have the Danish cartoons or films like Submission.

Humane and noble [religious] precepts have been destroyed by extremist 'Islamic' movements such as Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and others, that perpetrate hideous crimes against innocent [people] in their own countries as well as in other, non-Muslim, countries... When base, despicable acts are carried out by [Muslim] societies and nations, they cause tremendous harm to [Islamic] religious teachings.

This is what happened, for example, as a result of the September 11th crimes against the U.S., and as a result of the attacks in London and Madrid that followed in their wake.

Our Take

It is deeply moving to read the words of these writers. Reflexively we wonder about and worry for their physical safety. Emphatically we know that it is exactly this kind of brave self-examination that must ultimately save Islam from the moral abyss it has fallen into.

For our part, we must recognize that cultural fortitude and the willingness to use military force when necessary are the contributions we in the west can make in this battle between good and evil. But the spiritual heavy lifting can only come from inside Islam itself.

On a much smaller matter, we at CoverUps cannot help but notice how these sane and moral voices are coming from people who are called "liberal". We are sure there is a temptation on the part of self-described liberals in the west to see this as a validation of their own liberal ideas.

That would be a mistake.

Liberals in the Islamic world are very different from liberals in the west. Islamic liberals are fighting, at great risk to their own lives, against a fanatical religious movement that seeks absolute power over all persons living under it. Western liberals expose themselves to no such risk in pushing for their beliefs, and in fact seek to give to the state ever-greater powers to wield over their fellow citizens. There's a world of difference, dear reader, between the two – even if they happen at this point in time to have the same label.

Link to article.