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Written by Omid Safi
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Tuesday, 15 November 2005 |
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Challenges and Opportunities for
the Progressive Muslim in North America
By Omid Safi
Bism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim
In today’s political climate, it is a cliché to begin a discourse on
Islam and Muslims with the talk of “crisis.” It is not my intention
here to add to that unrelenting assault on Muslims. Instead, I
intend to explore the profound challenges and precious opportunity
confronting Muslims who self-identify as progressive.
Who are progressive Muslims?
Progressive Islam both continues and radically departs from the
150-year-old tradition of liberal Islam, that of figures like Abduh,
Afghani, Rida, Shari’ati, and others. Unlike some earlier modernists,
progressive Muslims are almost uniformly critical of colonialism, both
in its nineteenth-century manifestation and in its current variety.
Progressive Muslims develop a critical and nonapologetic “multiple
critique” with respect to both Islam and modernity.
Also unlike their liberal Muslim forefathers, progressive Muslims
represent a broad coalition of female and male Muslim activists and
intellectuals. One of the distinguishing features of the progressive
Muslim movement as the vanguard of Islamic (post)modernism has been the
high level of female participation as well as the move to highlight
women’s rights as part of a broader engagement with human rights.
Progressives measure their success not in developing new and
beatific theologies but rather by the amount of change for good on the
ground level that they can produce in Muslim and non-Muslim societies.
This movement is noted by a number of themes: striving to realize a
just and pluralistic society through critically engaging Islam, a
relentless pursuit of social justice, an emphasis on gender equality as
a foundation of human rights, a vision of religious and ethnic
pluralism, and a methodology of nonviolent resistance.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 November 2005 )
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Written by Ginan Rauf
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Wednesday, 09 November 2005 |
Homecoming
by Ginan Rauf
Ramadan is a long time to reflect upon belonging and the human need to
belong to a community. Holidays tend to intensify feelings of human
solidarity or to accentuate countervailing states of alienation.
Thanksgiving dinners are often gatherings for strange familiars during
which one experiences the uncanny as described by Freud; one is both at
home and without a home; one is among family members and among
strangers in whom the strange-ness we think we know might unexpectedly
erupt. Yet there is also something predictable about these sudden
eruptions that we intuitively sense but often exile to the repressed
strangeness within ourselves.
Last weekend I attended a conference entitled "Toward A New
Enlightenment" sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism on the
occasion of its 25th anniversary. It was something of a homecoming
tempered by the knowledge that homecomings are always fraught with
lingering discomforts. Exile simply is; it is an inescapable part of
the human condition and it propels our quest for comfort in an
increasingly bizarre world. Nonetheless, it was a spectacular
homecoming and for the first time in my life I experienced a truly
exhilarating sense of belonging. This- I thought to myself- is how
Malcolm X must have felt as he stood among other Muslims during the
pilgrimage to Mecca.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 11 November 2005 )
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Written by Zaid Shakir
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Monday, 31 October 2005 |
American Muslims, Human Rights,
and the Challenge of September 11, 2001
By Imam Zaid Shakir
Introduction
The tragic events of
September 11, 2001, have called into question many fundamental Islamic
principles, values, and beliefs. The ensuing discourse in many critical
areas reveals the weakness of Muslims in making meaningful and
substantive contributions towards a clear understanding of the Islamic
position on a number of critical issues. The purpose of this paper is
to examine one of those issues, human rights, in an effort to identify:
1. How human rights are defined in the Western and Islamic intellectual traditions;
2. Why human rights issues are of central importance to Islamic propagation efforts in North America;
3. What are the implications of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 for prevailing Muslim views of human rights?
This paper is not designed
to respond the attacks of those authors who assail the philosophy,
conceptualization, formulation, and application of human rights policy
among Muslims. Such a response would be quite lengthy, and owing to the
complexity of the project, would probably raise as many questions as it
resolved. Nor is it an attempt to call attention to the increasingly
problematic indifference of the United States government towards
respecting the civil liberties and other basic rights of its Muslim and
Arab citizens. We do hope that this paper will help American Muslims
identify and better understand some of the relevant issues shaping our
thought and action in the critical area of human rights.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 11 November 2005 )
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