Category Archives: Religion

Arab Spring breeze reaching to Islamists

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News
Monday, October 3, 2011

Islamic movements are softening their tone to avoid scaring off potential voters, with many pointing to Turkey and PM Erdoğan’s ‘neo-

Emerging into the open following the overthrow of authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world, Islamic movements are now wrestling with the idea of how to apply Islamic precepts to societies that are demanding democracy as one of the fruits of the Arab Spring.

Many such movements, such as the Tunisian Islamist Ennahda Party, are preaching a moderate line in an effort to avoid scaring off parts of society that are wary of parties with Muslim roots.

“We are not cut off from our environment … All the values of democracy and modernity are respected by Ennahda. We are a party that can find a balance between modernity and Islam,” Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda Party, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Western powers and governments in other Arab states are watching Tunisia’s election closely, worried that democratically elected Islamists might impose strict Islamic law and turn their back on Western allies. But Ghannouchi, who returned to Tunisia from exile in Britain after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s fall, said Western countries and Tunisian liberals had nothing to fear from a victory for his Ennahda party.

Two issues in particular, women’s equality and liberal moral attitudes, are seen by many Tunisians as a litmus test of how tolerant Ennahda will be if it gains power.

Ghannouchi’s remarks offering a more mild form of Islam came on the same day that the former leader of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood said he wanted a “democratic” Syria, not an Islamic state to replace the regime of embattled President Bashar al-Assad, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We support the establishment of a modern, civil, democratic state,” Ali al-Bayanouni told a conference organized by the Brookings Doha center in the Qatari capital.

Before the Arab Spring hit countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, their strongman leaders defended themselves for years as the bulwark preventing their countries from sliding into Islamist hands – an approach which helped them secure baking from Washington and other Western powers wary that their countries could turn into another Iran.

Western powers, however, soon began to support the uprisings and the emergence of a new Arab world. The topic is now dominating talk in Western capitals so much that the European Council’s Parliamentarian Assembly put the Arab Spring at the top of its agenda Monday.

NATO, too, is planning to devote greater attention to the subject, announcing a special summit on the spring on May 21-22 in Chicago.

Indeed, amid growing indications that some in the West are ready to work with the Islamists, one U.S. governmental source said Washington had had limited but direct talks with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was open to working with them.

Turkey an inspiration

Many in the region are pointing toward Turkey as a model for the Islamist parties in the region. Last month, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is seen as a trailblazer by many Islamists in the region, staged a tour of the three North African Arab Spring states. Striking a moderate chord, Erdoğan emphasized the concept of “neo-laicism,” noting that while individuals could be religious, states should remain secular.

The comments were controversial among some older members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, but his comments were well-received elsewhere by a new generation of pious Muslims who are eager to pursue religious-based politics within a democratic, tolerant and secularist framework.

Ultimately, Islamist leaders in the region are keen to stress the varieties of Islam that could be used as a political model.

“If the Islamic spectrum goes from [assassinated al-Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden to Erdoğan, which of them is Islam?” Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic. “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?”

In the end, even the hard-line Saudi model appears to be bending under the weight of the Arab Spring. Last week, King Abdullah decreed that women would be able to participate for the first time in the next local elections in 2015, a measure likely aimed at heading off Arab dissent in the kingdom. The same week he has also overturned a court ruling sentencing a Saudi woman to be lashed 10 times for defying the kingdom’s ban on female drivers.

© 2011 Hurriyet Daily News
URL: www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=arab-spring-breeze-reaching-to-islamists-2011-10-03

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to Allah

Friday, September 30, 2011The Libyan revolution, which put an end to Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year-long tyranny after a chaotic civil war, has an interesting motto: “There is no god but Allah, and Gadhafi is his enemy!” This is quite ironic, though, because the now-dethroned Libyan colonel had also been referring to God to justify his dictatorial rule. A mantra of his regime bluntly read: “Allah, Moammar, Libya: that’s all we need!”

The image of Allah, in other words, seems to have shifted in the minds of many Libyans from a pillar of authoritarian rule to a beacon of liberty.

A similar transformation seems to be unfolding in Syria as well, which used to have its own version of the authoritarian Arab trinity: “Allah, Syria, Bashar – that’s all we need!” But the peaceful Syrian protestors who have been raising their voice against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and co., despite all the killing and torture they face, are now using a different motto: “Allah, Syria, Freedom: that’s all we need!”

It is perfectly understandable that such religious themes within the Arab Spring are confusing, if not worrying, to Islamo-skeptic Westerners who assume that all political manifestations of Islam will lead to tyranny. However, the history of Muslim civilization shows that Islam has been understood in many different ways, and while it sometimes has been used to support tyrants, it more often than not challenged them.

In fact, one of the very early theological splits in Islam was precisely on this issue. The successive caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750 AD) promoted a theory of divine predestination, which implied that the corrupt Umayyad rule was predestined, and thus willed by God. The opposing theologians, who defended humans’ freewill, argued that rulers were responsible to both God and the people.

After a few centuries of debate, the Sunni view on this matter settled on a middle position, which valued strong rulers, but also expected them to be just and lawful. In the Ottoman Empire, the ritualistic expression of this idea was a popular slogan that common people would say to the sultans after Friday prayers: “Don’t be arrogant my sultan, God is greater than thou!”

In the modern age, however, traditional Islamic law, whose functions included constraining arbitrary power, failed to update itself, and was gradually rendered ineffective via “modernization.” As Harvard law professor Noah Feldman demonstrates in his book, “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State,” this process produced not the liberal democracy of the West, but various secular (and sometimes fiercely secularist) autocrats – such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran, or Gamal Abdal Nasser in Egypt.

Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that aspires for an “Islamic state,” was more of a reaction to this modern crisis, rather than a direct continuation of the Islamic tradition. It was also based on an export of the worst ideas of the West. One of the founders of the Islamist ideology, Pakistani thinker Sayyid Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, had openly acknowledged that his “Islamic state” would “bear a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.”

Here is the key question for today: If Mawdudi and his followers synthesized Islam with totalitarianism, can others synthesize it with liberal democracy?

The answer does not look as grim as some suspect. It’s not just the symbolic combination of “Allah” and “freedom” in the minds of the Arab masses, but the discussions among Muslim parties in Egypt and elsewhere are also raising hopes for a liberal future.

To be sure, the transformation of the Muslim mind from authoritarianism to liberalism would be a very challenging process. But was the political evolution of Christianity any easier? It certainly took a lot of effort to move from the Spanish Inquisition and the “divine right of kings” to the liberating motto of the U.S. founder Benjamin Franklin: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Islam is just no less capable of going the same distance.

© 2011 Hurriyet Daily News
URL: www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=rebellion-to-tyrants-is-obedience-to-allah-2011-09-30

Activists in Arab World Vie to Define Islamic State

# The New York Times
Reprints September 29, 2011

By ANTHONY SHADID and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — By force of this year’s Arab revolts and revolutions, activists marching under the banner of Islam are on the verge of a reckoning decades in the making: the prospect of achieving decisive power across the region has unleashed an unprecedented debate over the character of the emerging political orders they are helping to build.

Few question the coming electoral success of religious activists, but as they emerge from the shadows of a long, sometimes bloody struggle with authoritarian and ostensibly secular governments, they are confronting newly urgent questions about how to apply Islamic precepts to more open societies with very concrete needs.

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name “Islamist” to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

A backlash has ensued, as well, as traditionalists have flirted with timeworn Islamist ideas like imposing interest-free banking and obligatory religious taxes and censoring irreligious discourse.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.

“That’s the struggle of the future,” said Azzam Tamimi, a scholar and the author of a biography of a Tunisian Islamist, Rachid Ghannouchi, whose party, Ennahda, is expected to dominate elections next month to choose an assembly to draft a constitution. “The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout public. It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.”

The moment is as dramatic as any in recent decades in the Arab world, as autocracies crumble and suddenly vibrant parties begin building a new order, starting with elections in Tunisia in October, then Egypt in November. Though the region has witnessed examples of ventures by Islamists into politics, elections in Egypt and Tunisia, attempts in Libya to build a state almost from scratch and the shaping of an alternative to Syria’s dictatorship are their most forceful entry yet into the region’s still embryonic body politic.

“It is a turning point,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar on Islamic law and politics at the University of Notre Dame who was in Cairo.

At the center of the debates is a new breed of politician who has risen from an Islamist milieu but accepts an essentially secular state, a current that some scholars have already taken to identifying as “post Islamist.” Its foremost exemplars are Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey, whose intellectuals speak of a shared experience and a common heritage with some of the younger members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and with the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. Like Turkey, Tunisia faced decades of a state-enforced secularism that never completely reconciled itself with a conservative population.

“They feel at home with each other,” said Cengiz Candar, an Arabic-speaking Turkish columnist. “It’s similar terms of reference, and they can easily communicate with them.”

Mr. Ghannouchi, the Tunisian Islamist, has suggested a common ambition, proposing what some say Mr. Erdogan’s party has managed to achieve: a prosperous, democratic Muslim state, led by a party that is deeply religious but operates within a system that is supposed to protect liberties. (That is the notion, at least — Mr. Erdogan’s critics accuse him of a pronounced streak of authoritarianism.)

“If the Islamic spectrum goes from Bin Laden to Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” Mr. Ghannouchi asked in a recent debate with a secular critic. “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models, models that combine Islam and modernity?”

The notion of an Arab post-Islamism is not confined to Tunisia. In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Mr. Ghannouchi as a major influence. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who is running for president in Egypt, has joined several new breakaway political parties in arguing that the state should avoid interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.

A party formed by three leaders of the Brotherhood’s youth wing says that while Egypt shares a common Arab and Islamic culture with the region, its emerging political system should ensure protections of individual freedoms as robust as the West’s. In an interview, one of them, Islam Lotfy, argued that the strictly religious kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the Koran is ostensibly the constitution, was less Islamist than Turkey. “It is not Islamist; it is dictatorship,” said Mr. Lotfy, who was recently expelled from the Brotherhood for starting the new party.

Egypt’s Center Party, a group that struggled for 16 years to win a license from the ousted government, may go furthest here in elaborating the notion of post-Islamism. Its founder, Abul-Ela Madi, has long sought to mediate between religious and liberal forces, even coming up with a set of shared principles last month. Like the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, he disavows the term “Islamist,” and like other progressive Islamic activists, he describes his group as Egypt’s closest equivalent of Mr. Erdogan’s party.

“We’re neither secular nor Islamist,” he said. “We’re in between.”

It is often heard in Turkey that the country’s political system, until recently dominated by the military, moderated Islamic currents there. Mr. Lotfy said he hoped that Egyptian Islamists would undergo a similar, election-driven evolution, though activists themselves cautioned against drawing too close a comparison. “They went to the streets and they learned that the public was not just worried about the hijab” — the veil — “but about corruption,” he said. “If every woman in Turkey wore the hijab, it would not be a great country. It takes economic development.”

Compared with the situation in Turkey, the stakes of the debates may be even higher in the Arab world, where divided and weak liberal currents pale before the organization and popularity of Islamic activists.

In Syria, debates still rage among activists over whether a civil or Islamic state should follow the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, if he falls. The emergence in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria of Salafists, the most inflexible currents in political Islam, is one of the most striking political developments in those societies. (“The Koran is our constitution,” goes one of their sayings.)

And the most powerful current in Egypt, still represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, has stubbornly resisted some of the changes in discourse.

When Mr. Erdogan expressed hope for “a secular state in Egypt,” meaning, he explained, a state equidistant from all faiths, Brotherhood leaders immediately lashed out, saying that Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey offered no model for either Egypt or its Islamists.

A Brotherhood spokesman, Mahmoud Ghozlan, accused Turkey of violating Islamic law by failing to criminalize adultery. “In the secularist system, this is accepted, and the laws protect the adulterer,” he said, “But in the Shariah law this is a crime.”

As recently as 2007, a prototype Brotherhood platform sought to bar women or Christians from serving as Egypt’s president and called for a panel of religious scholars to advise on the compliance of any legislation with Islamic law. The group has never disavowed the document. Its rhetoric of Islam’s long tolerance of minorities often sounds condescending to Egypt’s Christian minority, which wants to be afforded equal citizenship, not special protections. The Brotherhood’s new party has called for a special surtax on Muslims to enforce charitable giving.

Indeed, Mr. Tamimi, the scholar, argued that some mainstream groups like the Brotherhood, were feeling the tug of their increasingly assertive conservative constituencies, which still relentlessly call for censorship and interest-free banking.

“Is democracy the voice of the majority?” asked Mohammed Nadi, a 26-year-old student at a recent Salafist protest in Cairo. “We as Islamists are the majority. Why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities — the liberals and the secularists? That’s all I want to know.”

Anthony Shadid reported from Cairo, and Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli, Libya. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

Alevi / Alawi, what are the differences?

While there are apparent  similarities, they are quite different in their history and  the details of their doctrine. Like most moslem sects they are very complex to understand and even more difficult to summarize!

Alevis  and Alawis have in common that , to a certain degree they consider themselves to be part of the wider Shi`a movement, who revere Ali (Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law) and the Twelve Imams of his house (Ithna’shari).

According to Yaron Friedman, distinct Alawi/Alavi beliefs include the belief that prayers are not necessary, they don’t fast, nor perform pilgrimage, nor have specific places of worship.

1. Syrian Alawis are a prominent mystical and syncretic religious group centered in Syria who are often described as a branch of Shia Islam.  The sect seems to have been organized by a follower of Muhammad ibn Nusayr, who died in Aleppo about 969.  It has integrated doctrines from Ismaili Islam and Christianity ( i.e celebration of Chritsmas …).

A fatwa by Imam Musa al Sadr declares them  Shi’a Muslims, that is Ithna’shari (Twelve Imams). He said: The Alawis are of the Shi’a and the Shi’a are of the Alawis. The most obvious difference between Alawites and Shi’ite Muslims, is that Alawis believe the Sunni Caliph and Shi’ite Imam Ali is an incarnation of one of the persons of God and wholly divine, along with Jesus Christ, The Prophet Muhammad and many other eastern holy men

2. Turkish Alevism’s origin is controversial. It goes back to Shah Ismail (founder of the Safavid dynasty in Azerbajian, Iran). His father Sheikh Haydar was part of a  Sufi order and the leader of the growing Shia community in Azerbajian, the Qizilbash.

The Turkish Alevis ( originally called Qizilbashi )  have complex theological beliefs derived from Shiism but with some particularities, one of them is the belief of the unity of Allah, Mohammad and Ali. They also believe in the Twelve Imams but with a different interpretation of their symbols. They behave more like a Sufi order minus shari’a. There are many branches among them with different doctrines.  Some go to  Qom in Iran to study in Shia religious schools.

Turkish_Alevis_Today.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Turkey’s Elephant in the Room: Religious Freedom.

Osman Orsal/Reuters –

With his triumphant tour of the countries of the Arab Spring this month, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has managed to set up Turkey on the international stage as a role model for a secular democracy in a Muslim .The only trouble is that he has yet to make that happen for Turkey.

The relationship between religion and the state, ever the sore spot of Turkish identity, is one of the most explosive issues of the debate on the new constitution that Mr. Erdogan has pledged to give the country in the new legislative term that opens Saturday.

That debate will have to deal with the elephant in the room: the total control that the state exerts over Islam through its Religious Affairs Department, and the lack of a legal status for all other religions in a predominantly Sunni Muslim society.

“Turkey may look like a secular state on paper, but in terms of international law it is actually a Sunni Islamic state,” Izzettin Dogan, a leader of the country’s Alevi minority, charged at a joint press conference with leaders of several other minority faiths last week in Istanbul.

Mr. Dogan is honorary president of the Federation of Alevi Foundations, which represents many of what it claims are up to 30 million adherents of the Alevi faith, an Anatolian religion close to Sufi Islam but separate and distinct in its beliefs and practices.

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

A bureaucratic juggernaut with its own news service and a dedicated trade union, the Religious Affairs Department employs more than 106,000 civil servants, according to its latest annual report, including 60,000 imams and 10,000 muezzins, all of them trained, hired and fired by the state.

At the institution’s ministry-size headquarters in Ankara, state-employed astronomers calculate prayer times around the world, while state-educated theologians pore over the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad in the library and issue the religious rulings known as fatwas.

The department writes the sermons for Friday Prayer in mosques across the country as well as the textbooks for the religious instruction that is mandatory in schools. It publishes books and periodicals in languages including Tatar, Mongol and Uygur, and issues an iPhone app featuring Koranic verses and a prayertime alarm. The department has a monopoly on Koran courses in the country, and it organizes the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, right down to the vaccination of pilgrims.

So centralized is the department’s control that its new president, Mehmet Gormez, is considered innovative for announcing his intention to train preachers to deliver sermons in person, instead of having them piped into the mosque from the department over a public-address system.

“In Turkey, Islam does not determine politics, but politics determine Islam,” Gunter Seufert, a sociologist, concluded in a 2004 study of the department entitled “State and Islam in Turkey.”

“Run by a state agency, religion serves the nation state for the purpose of unifying the nation and Westernizing its Muslims,” he added.

With historical roots in the Ottoman Empire, where state and Islam were linked in the union of sultanate and caliphate, the Religious Affairs Department was founded early in the Turkish Republic, in March 1924, on the day the caliphate was abolished.

Charged by law with managing Islam, the department has been enshrined in the Constitution ever since the country’s first military coup in 1961, with the present Constitution, a relic of the 1982 coup, explicitly charging it with the task of furthering national unity.

Ministering to Sunni Islam of the Halafi school, the department does not recognize non-Sunni communities like the Alevis or Caferis as distinct religious faiths, subsuming them under the common label of “Muslim,” the basis for the depiction of Turkey as a religiously homogenous country that describes its population as “99 percent Muslim.”

While the distribution of believers among the faiths encompassed by that term is contested, a 2007 survey by the Konda institute, a public opinion research company in Turkey, found that 82 percent of Turks describe themselves as Hanafi Sunni Muslims.

The new constitution, Mr. Dogan of the Alevi federation demanded, must do away with their privileged status. “The state must be impartial and treat all religious communities equally and maintain equal distance to all of them,” he said. “These definitions must be written into the new constitution verbatim.”

Mr. Dogan was speaking at the presentation of a report on the “Shared Problems and Demands of Turkey’s Religious Communities,” prepared by Ozge Genc and Ayhan Kaya, political scientists at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The report is based on research in the Apostolic, Catholic and Protestant Armenian communities, the Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches as well as the Jewish community and Bahai, Yezidi, Shiite, Alevi, Mevlevi, Caferi and other groups.

As the report underlines, these communities all suffer from lack of legal status in Turkey, which renders it difficult for them to conduct even the most basic affairs and forces them into a shadowy existence at the mercy of political fashions and whims.

The 1,700-year-old Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, for example, has come to the brink of extinction since its seminary in Istanbul was closed down 40 years ago, drying up its source of clergymen. The Patriarchate hopes that the new constitution will “create the conditions for a reopening of the seminary,” its spokesman, Pater Dositheos Anagnostopoulos, said by e-mail this week.

This will require a redefinition of the concept of secularism in Turkey, or simply a definition of the term in the Turkish constitution, as Mustafa Akyol, author of “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” points out.

“The present constitution states that Turkey is laic, secular, but does not define the term,” Mr. Akyol said by telephone this week. The interpretation has been left up to the constitutional court, he said, which has traditionally defined secularism as the complete absence of religion from the public sphere, as seen in its ban on head scarves for university students. It was that ban, among other things, that triggered the current secularism debate in Islamist circles, Mr. Akyol said.

“They began to see nuances in Western secularism. They saw that religious freedoms not available to them in Turkey, like the head scarf or the freedom to join Muslim orders, were available in America and many European countries, excepting France,” he said. “They began to criticize the self-styled Turkish secularism, and to call for a redefinition of secularism.”

While the debate still rages in Turkish society, “I think Erdogan made it clear that he is sincere” in his call for secularism, Mr. Akyol said. “That is how we would like to have it defined in the new constitution,” he added, referring to Mr. Erdogan’s remark that all religions should be equal.

But the Religious Affairs Department may not be so easy to sideline. While most of the proposals for the constitution prepared by nongovernmental organizations for the debate agree that the department cannot continue in its present form, none suggests abolishing it.

Even Tesev, an independent research institute in Istanbul, argues that “dissolving the Religious Affairs Department is not considered possible under present conditions.” It suggests that other religious groups should be given equal status and privileges instead.

Other constitutional proposals suggest that the department’s reach should be extended to include other faiths, an idea unlikely to sit well with all communities.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople, while declining to comment on the proposal, has strenuously resisted previous proposals to incorporate its seminary into the theological faculty of a state university, arguing that it cannot relinquish control over its training.

While the Religious Affairs Department may face change, it is unlikely to be abolished, Mr. Akyol said. “Society is so used to it, so many people work for it,” he said. “I don’t expect it to change with the new constitution.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/world/europe/turkeys-elephant-in-the-room-religious-freedom.html?pagewanted=all

Return of the Islamists? A Questionable Form of Freedom for North Africa

09/28/2011 AM Der Spiegel —
By Clemens Höges and Thilo Thielke–

The autocrats are gone, but who will inherit power in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt? Islamist influence is significant across the region and conservative political groups are flexing their muscles. The coming months will determine just how much democracy North Africa can support.

Ammunition crates, now empty in the wake of recent heavy fighting, are stacked outside the military barracks at the Tripoli airport. One of the victors, wearing military fatigues, is sitting in a luxurious leather armchair inside the building. He presses his combat boots into the thick carpet, his facial features as rigid as if they had been sculpted. The man speaks intently. He wants to make sure that each of his sentences is recorded on video, and that nothing is misunderstood.

For years, American and British intelligence agencies hunted Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the commander of the Libyan rebels’ Tripoli brigade, believing him to be a terrorist and ally of then al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. They also reportedly had him abducted, which led to his being tortured with syringes and ice-cold water. Now though, the West and many in Libya are paying close attention, and are listening to his every word.

“In reality, our group had nothing to do with al-Qaida at the time,” says Belhaj, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and the former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which, persecuted by the regime of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, took refuge in Afghanistan for years. Belhaj, the battle-hardened Islamist, is now the commander of all rebel troops in the Libyan capital.

His men drive around in their pickups, outfitted with automatic weapons while the civilian heads of the rebellion seek to map out a path for their country’s future. Belhaj says that the power lies “in the hands of the Libyan people,” and that Libyans can now decide democratically how they wish to live their lives. “We want a secular country,” he adds. But many Libyans don’t believe a word the Islamist is saying.

Deep Differences

There is, after all, more at stake today than merely the question of who is currently in power. It is about shaping Libya’s future. The Arab Spring uprisings in North Africa are over, and in the wake of the change of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, a coalition of Islamists and secular insurgents has emerged victorious in Libya. But now that the war is almost over, the deep differences between the two groups are becoming more apparent.

As in Tunisia and Egypt, it will soon become apparent how democratic the new Libya can be. Will it develop along the lines of the Turkish model, for which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently campaigned on a celebrated trip through the Arab world? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, will it model itself after the Iranian theocracy?

The old dictators were convenient for the West, because they kept the Islamists under control. But now that the people have liberated themselves, their new freedoms apply to everyone, including the Islamists and jihadists who want to see Sharia law introduced in their respective countries. They are demanding their share of power, which is hardly likely to be small.

The Islamists’ brigades fought well in Libya. Indeed, even decades before the revolutions in North Africa, they were the best-organized opposition in the three countries. Their leaders were locked up, tortured and killed. The Islamists paid a heavy price, which has made their supporters tough. They also have greater financial resources than other opposition groups, partly because of support from Gulf sheikhs like the leader of Qatar.

A constitutional convention is to be elected in Tunisia in four weeks, and polls show that the religious Nahda Party could capture 20 to 30 percent of the vote. This would likely give the Islamists more power than any secular party.

Sizeable Potential

This comes as no surprise, since the Islamists have the largest election campaign war chest, they fund scholarships and social projects, they are omnipresent and preach piety. Women are already complaining about being attacked in broad daylight. When a film critical of religion was shown in Tunis, Islamists stormed out of the theater and physically assaulted the owners.

Observers in Egypt believe that the Islamists there — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists — hold a similar potential among voters. The Muslim Brotherhood, now calling itself the Freedom and Justice Party, already wants to establish strict rules for foreign women wearing bikinis on Egyptian beaches. Members of the Salafist sect have established a number of different parties.

When the two groups organized a joint rally on Tahrir Square in Cairo, tens of thousands showed up to demonstrate for an Islamic state. Some are blaming the Salafists for a recent rise in arson attacks on Coptic Christian churches in Egypt.

The situation in Libya is much more chaotic than in the two neighboring countries, partly because the rebels are still fighting the last remaining Gadhafi loyalists. Nevertheless, the National Transitional Council, headed by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, and the so-called Executive Committee, under the chairmanship of Mahmoud Jibril, have presented roadmap to democracy which calls for the election of a 200-member national congress in about eight months. Within a year, the congress would draw up a constitution, organize a constitutional referendum and eventually hold free elections.

Military leader Belhaj already feels powerful enough to counter Jibril, who serves as the de facto prime minister. Belhaj, in fact, is trying to oust Jibril from his position.

Charges of Corruption

But the two most influential Libyan Islamists are probably the Salabi brothers. Ismail Salabi commands one of the toughest rebel brigades in Benghazi. His brother Ali, considered one of the country’s religious leaders, travels back and forth between Libya and Qatar, the Arab nation on the Persian Gulf that supplied the rebels with weapons and trained its fighters.

The Salabis have already tried several times to discredit members of the National Transitional Council with charges of corruption. Ali Salabi claims the council is filled with “radical secularists” who are trying to sideline the religious groups before elections, and that Jibril wants to usher in a “new era of tyranny and dictatorship.”

The Islamists now plan to establish a religious party. If they do not do well in the election, however, says Ali Salabi, they will still respect the will of the people. Salabi insists that he believes in democracy.

But many distrust radicals like the Salabis, especially since the murder of Abdul Fattah Younis. Gadhafi’s former interior minister, Younis joined the rebels days after the rebellion began, and, as their commander-in-chief, developed their army. His was one of three bodies were found near Benghazi on July 28. To this day, it remains unclear who shot Younis and his two companions and then burned the bodies, although suspicions point to the Islamists.

Fathi Bin Issa, editor-in-chief of the new Tripoli newspaper Arus al-Bahr, is sitting in his long, narrow office, a room bathed in cold fluorescent light. The red, black and green flag of the new Libya hangs next to his desk. Bin Issa was the spokesman of the rebels shortly after they captured the capital, and his editors now write regular features about the Islamists. He says that he received several death threats only last week, with callers threatening to blow up his office.

Good Connections and an Agenda
“There are people here who are trying to build a Libyan Hezbollah,” says Bin Issa. “There is a great risk that they will assume power.” In some neighborhoods, says the journalist, religious edicts, or fatwas, have already been issued banning women from going out in public alone. He also says that some beauty salons have been shut down, and that members of a self-proclaimed religious police have started appearing in the streets. “These people have good connections, and they have an agenda. That’s what makes them so dangerous.” In Bin Issa’s opinion, everything now depends on how civilian society reacts to the changes. “If we are unable to repel these people, we could see conditions like those in Iran or under the Taliban,” says Bin Issa.

The supporter of the revolution believes that his fellow Libyans are not in favor of radical Islam. “Here in Libya, women work as pilots and judges, and they have been instrumental in bringing about change. Our Islam is moderate.”

Colonel Ali Ahmed Barathi, 53, is the new chief of the military police in Tripoli. His headquarters once housed the notorious 32nd Brigade, a group that practiced torture and was headed by Gadhafi’s son Khamis. The barracks is on the outskirts of Tripoli, where Colonel Barathi is sitting in his office at an enormous desk. He is wearing the obligatory sunglasses and has the rough hands of a professional soldier, and yet Barathi is soft-spoken.

The officer is from Benghazi, where he joined the rebels immediately. “I stood in front of my unit and said that I intended to switch sides. It was left up to each soldier to decide whether to join us. The entire unit defected.”

Skirmishes with Islamists

Barathi isn’t worried about the Islamists’ activities. “Libyans don’t want to be ruled by these people. Even Belhaj has recognized this and has been reserved in his comments.”

But then he talks about skirmishes with Islamists and says that his men broke apart an entire unit of Islamists at the beginning of the rebellion. “The Islamists were isolated by the tribes, which wanted no part of them. After we had given them the ultimatum to either fight by our sides or lay down their weapons, many turned over their weapons, while others defected.”

The dispute between Islamists and secular Libyans could even have a positive outcome — true pluralism — hopes Aref Nayed, the coordinator of the so-called stability team of the rebel government. A wealthy IT entrepreneur, Islamic scholar and philosopher, Nayed is often found in the lobby of the Hotel Corinthia along the Tripoli shoreline, along with many of the country’s political leaders.

An elegant man with a neatly trimmed beard, Nayed studied in Canada and the United States, and has worked in Italy. He is adept at maneuvering between opposing fronts.

‘Keeping Society Together’

After Pope Benedict XVI incited religious Muslims against the Catholic Church with an awkward speech in 2006, Nayed was one of 138 Muslim scholars to sign a letter initiating reconciliation talks. When Nayed joined the National Transitional Council, the Vatican announced that it was pleased to see that an “old friend” had become a key figure in Libya.

Nayed dreams of a compromise between secular and Islamist Libya, an arrangement that could become a model for the Arab world, one in which Islamists would be recognized as a political force, even while women occupied cabinet posts. None of this, says Nayed, would be contradictory to the tenets of Islam. Council head Abdul Jalil, a very devout Muslim, also supports a compromise. Abdul Jalil envisions a moderate Islamic democracy with a legal system based on Sharia. Besides, says Nayed, it is so much the political leaders but Libya’s tribes “that are keeping society together.”

While he enthusiastically quotes ancient philosophers, the weapon in his waistband slips out from under his expensive jacket. His narrow belt isn’t strong enough to hold the heavy 9-mm piston. “I have no idea how to use it,” Nayed mutters. He says that his bodyguards insisted that he carry the gun, so that he would not be unprotected when going out in public.

A large photo of murdered General Younis hands on Martyr’s Square — known as Green Square until the rebels arrived — in downtown Tripoli. The rebel general knew how to use his weapon, but it didn’t do him any good.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:

* http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,788397,00.html

Are religious ideologies dominating the Middle East?

Countries with strong ideologies aim to export their ideology that they perceive as the ‘best’. Arabs did it with Islam, Europe did it with Christianity, the Soviet Union did it with communism, the USA is doing it with capitalism.
Religious ideologies work the same way. Saudi Arabia tries to expand its Sunni Wahabism and Iran its Shia ideology.
Because Saudi Arabia has no rich history, its ideology is based on the strict application to the Islamic law as a way of life with a capitalistic approach in line with the USA: Malls and Mosques. Iran has a long history of civilization so its ideology is more complex and progressive in the interpretation of Islamic law and contrary to Saudi Arabia, it attributes an importance to art and self-analysis in the social life.
Somehow because of history, Sunnism is viewed as conservative, capitalist and business oriented while Shiism is revolutionary, socialist and intellectual.

Of course these ideologies once exported , are supposed to be adapted to the local customs, yet their “world view” remain the same.

Turkey has more resemblance with Iran for its history and has a good dose of secularism injected by Ataturk but I think Turkey is still a very conservative moslem country in the rural areas. In a way, Turkey is like a wilder Saudi Arabia: Malls, Mosques and…Whisky.

In summary, I think, all countries that consider themselves as powerful would give the first priority to export their ideology and way of life (whether religious or social). This is often done in subtle and insidious ways by using the weaknesses of the target country and many cover ups in order to develop a grassroot that may spread the ideology further. While important to maintain their power, economical relation has less priority for religious ideologies.
I think this subject can be discussed forever…

Libya’s Revolution Produces a New Hybrid: Pro-Western Islamists

Sep. 16, 2011 By Abigail Hauslohner / Tripoli–

The Libyan rebels chuckle when they find a child-size T-shirt featuring a cartoon of Osama bin Laden amid the surveillance files, tapes and photos in one of the buildings abandoned by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s internal security forces. Sporting thick, bushy beards in a fresh show of religiosity they say never would have been tolerated under the old regime, they have mixed feelings about the man on the T-shirt. “Fighting in the name of Islam is something that all Muslims respect,” says Mukhtar Enhaysi, carefully. “But when [bin Laden] makes explosions and commits acts of terrorism against civilians who have nothing to do with that, no one agrees with that.”

Enhaysi’s nuanced view is commonplace in a country whose citizens are suddenly free to express themselves, although the subtle Islamist current in the rebellion has worried some of its Western backers. Rebel forces in Tripoli are commanded by a former associate of bin Laden’s whom the CIA had sent to Libya for questioning and torture by Gaddafi’s regime. And the leader of the rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) has called for a constitution guided by Islamic values, reflecting popular sentiment in a country whose people describe themselves as conservative and who have endured 42 years of enforced — albeit, many say, superficial — secularism under Gaddafi, even as he tried to style himself as the nemesis of the West. (See pictures of the lengthy battle for Libya.)

Interim leader Mustafa Abdel-Jalil told a cheering crowd in Tripoli’s Martyrs’ Square this week, “We seek a state of law, prosperity and one where Shari’a [Islamic law] is the main source for legislation, and this requires many things and conditions,” adding that “extremist ideology” would not be tolerated.

Indeed, for a citizenry that views itself as inherently more conservative than its Egyptian and Tunisian neighbors, it shouldn’t be surprising that Libya’s interim leaders are already emphasizing the Islamic character of their future government. But many say Gaddafi’s legacy — and NATO’s recent intervention — has also paved the way for a different kind of Islamist than the type that Washington has long feared. “The fact that Gaddafi used [the West] as a common enemy, well, the saying ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ holds very true here,” says one official in the NTC, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If you compound that with the fact that the Westerners were instrumental in their support [of the rebels] and in the demise of Gaddafi, you see that people are really quite friendly.” (See a brief history of Gaddafi’s 40-year rule.)

On Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first Western heads of state to visit liberated Tripoli, where they were given a warm welcome by Libya’s transitional authorities. “The Libyans will not forget the 19th of March, when the international community acted to protect Libya and pass a no-fly zone,” Abdel-Jalil said at a joint press conference. He promised a close friendship going forward.

And it’s a kind of paradox that has become increasingly evident on Libya’s streets in recent weeks. Across rebel-controlled territory, Libyans are becoming more expressively religious, holding Islamist group meetings and discussions on the management of mosque funding even as they verbalize an enthusiasm for NATO rare in the Arab world. To that end, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the former jihadist rebel commander in Tripoli, has disavowed extremism and pledged tolerance toward other religions, despite recently discovered Libyan government documents that corroborate his story of rendition by the CIA. “I’m not motivated by revenge against those who did that,” he told TIME. “We are very close to our European neighbors, and we want good relations with those countries, both economically and even in security.” The idea of an Islamist-led democracy may jar with post-9/11 thinking in the West but not necessarily in the Muslim world. “It’s not something we’re inventing,” says the NTC official, citing Turkey and Qatar — although the latter, despite its support for the rebellion, can’t exactly be called a democracy. (See photos of life in Benghazi during wartime.)

“Generally, in the West, they confuse Islamist with bin Laden,” says Saleh Ibrahim, a Libyan journalist, exiting one of Tripoli’s largest mosques after the Friday noon prayer. “I think a moderate government will be put in place that will reflect Islamic values, but it won’t be extremist.”

Most Libyans are Sunni Muslim, meaning there’s little risk of sectarian conflict — although tribal and regional schisms have been visible even within the rebellion. And there have been signs of a rift between “Islamists” and “secularists” in the NTC. The so-called secularists dominate its executive committee and include the U.S.-educated acting Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril and Ali Tarhouni, the Finance and Oil Minister who left his job as an economics professor in the U.S. to join the rebellion. (See more on the winners and losers of the Libyan revolution.)

Jibril has been harshly criticized by some rebels, including Tripoli commander Belhaj, for excluding Islamist voices from the NTC leadership even as he tries to bring rebel fighters under stricter central control. But Jibril sees competing groups playing “the political game” and staking their own claims for power. The Prime Minister’s critics say the real line of conflict is between remnants of the old regime — who they say remain close to Jibril — and the revolution’s fighters. “I’m not an Islamist, but I feel like I have more in common with the Islamists than I do with the secularists who are in the picture right now,” says the NTC official. “Why? Because I think the Islamists have no connection with the old regime. They’re more nationalist. And they have no frozen assets, that’s for sure.”

Some see tensions mounting, with Abdel-Jalil being the key to holding the rebel coalition together. Rebel fighters chafed at the NTC leadership’s orders to delay the assault on remaining Gaddafi strongholds such as Sirt and Bani Walid to allow loyalist forces more time to surrender. NTC officials say the purpose was to demonstrate their commitment to reconciliation. But Jibril’s opponents brand it a move to delay the formation of a government while staffing interim ministries with his cronies and political allies. “At the end of the day, [Jibril] might drive the Islamists to do things that will probably label them as extremists — like taking revenge and liquidating those whom they consider obstacles,” says the NTC official. “And then you’ve left behind the democratic option, and you’ve taken the option born of frustration, because they’re not involved in the decisionmaking process.”

Some Western analysts fear that Belhaj and other Islamists could suddenly become more extreme amid frustration over the executive committee’s attempts to rein in Libya’s roving militias and a climate of rising piety. “He never allowed us to dress like this before,” says Fatima Muftah, a 47-year-old whose face and body are entirely concealed by a black veil and gloves. “I’m a computer programmer, but I could never wear this to work.” For the sake of TIME’s short-sleeved correspondent, she adds, “I have no problem with what you’re wearing. Women should be free to wear what they want.” (Read about Gaddafi’s delusions of African grandeur.)

The NTC official is sanguine. “Whatever is going to happen here is going to be unique to Libya,” he says, sitting in a Tripoli hotel lobby on a busy weekday afternoon. “It’s not going to be an Egyptian model or an Iranian model or a Sudanese model. It’s going to be closer to Turkey, but without the alcohol, without the discothèques.” The lobby around him is buzzing with the chatter of Libyan youths in hipster plaid, bearded rebels cradling Kalashnikovs, members of Abdel-Jalil’s entourage, and a group of women seeking to form a women’s-rights group. “This is the only Arab country that has 100% of the same faith,” he adds. “The division that people are trying to project — it doesn’t exist.”

The Islamic case for a secular state

20 Sept 2011  MUSTAFA AKYOL –

When Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promoted the secular state last week during his trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, many were surprised. Especially ultra-secularist Turks, who are used to calling Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, “Islamist,” could not believe their eyes.

I was much less surprised, though. Because I knew that what I call “the AKP’s transition from Islamism to post-Islamism” was real. I even tried to explain its reasoning in a series of pieces titled “The Islamic case for a secular state,” which appeared in this very column some four years ago.

Here is a long excerpt from one of those pieces:

“In June 1998, a very significant meeting took place at a hotel near Abant, which is a beautiful lake in the east of Istanbul. The participants included some of the most respected theologians and Islamic intellectuals in Turkey. For three days, the group of nearly 50 scholars discussed the concept of a secular state and its compatibility with Islam. At the end, they all agreed to sign a common declaration that drew some important conclusions

“The first of these was the rejection of theocracy. The participants emphasized the importance of individual reasoning in Islam and declared, ‘No one can claim a divine authority in the interpretation of religion.’ This was a clear rejection of the theocratic political doctrines — such as the one established in the neighboring Iran — which granted a divinely ordained right to a specific group of people for guiding society.

“The second important conclusion of the Abant participants was the harmony of the principles of divine sovereignty and popular sovereignty. (Some contemporary Islamists reject democracy by assuming a contradiction between the two.) ‘Of course God is sovereign over the whole universe,’ the participants said. ‘But this is a metaphysical concept that does not contradict with the idea of popular sovereignty, which allows societies to rule their own affairs.’

“The third argument in the declaration was the acceptance of a secular state that would ‘stand at the same distance from all beliefs and philosophies.’ The state, the participants noted, ‘is an institution that does not have any metaphysical or political sacredness,’ and Islam has no problem with such political entities as far as they value rights and freedoms.

“In sum, the ‘Abant Platform,’ as it became known, declared the compatibility of Islam with a secular state based on liberal democracy. This was a milestone not only because the participants included top Islamic thinkers, but also because the organizers were members of Turkey’s strongest Islamic community, the Fethullah Gülen movement.”

In the following years, some of the participants of this Abant Platform became ministers in AKP Cabinets, and the ideas they articulated guided the AKP on matters of religion and politics. (In that sense, both the Gülen Movement, and the Said Nursi tradition that it sprang from, deserve credit for helping create the AKP.)

So, you might ask, what was the big war over secularism that haunted Turkey in the past decade?

Well, it was a war between those wanted a secular state and those who wanted to preserve the secularist one, which was not based on neutrality but on hostility toward religion. In the same series of pieces on Islam and the secular state, I noted:

“Today the big question in Turkey is whether our republic will be a secular or a secularist one. Our homegrown secularists have never gone as far and radical as Mao, but some of them share a similar hostility toward religion. And they have every right to do so as far as they accept to be unprivileged players in civil society. But they don’t have the right to dominate the state and use the money of the religious taxpayers in order to offend and suppress their beliefs.”

Today, Turkey is more secular but less secularist. And that is why it is making more sense to Arabs and other Muslims.

* For all writings of Mustafa Akyol, including his recent book, “Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty,” visit his blog at www.thewhitepath.com. On Twitter, follow him at @AkyolinEnglish.

© 2011 Hurriyet Daily News
URL: www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=the-islamic-case-for-a-secular-state-2011-09-20