Yet another heretic / progressive Muslim blog – this one was really walking the line – has disappeared. Muslim Hedonist, aka Crypto-Muslim, was a blog by a woman who left a traditional, conservative, polygamous Muslim life and began to make her way in the world as a single mom, lesbian, and person who was right at the edge of the circle of Islam. It was really interesting reading and definitely something that needed to be heard.
Now it’s gone and it is yet another voice of dissent against the Islamic so-called mainstream that has disappeared. I hope that the disappearance of ex-Muslim and heretical Muslim blogs represents the final freedom of that individual from Islam. Sometimes I’m worried that it represents something else entirely.
Instead of sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll, it’s sex, fatawah, & killin’. There is something that brings us together across our great philosophical and political and theological divides: sex. You, me, Dan Savage, and Mufti Mullahbags, we’re all interested in it, want to talk about it, think about it, and hopefully, do it.
Remember the woman in Dubai who was charged with fornication with her fiancee after she reported being raped? They dropped the charges after she produced a marriage certificate from last November, but she says she was coerced into dropping the rape complaint.
In Turkey, a family buried their daughter alive in a hole as punishment for her speaking to boys. She had gone to the police three times for protection, and was sent home three times. Thankfully, some religious influential Turks have condemned this crime and the family.
Crazy “Lady of Al Qaida” Aafia Siddiqui has been found guilty of attempted murder. Naturally, she blames Israel for this.
A scholar – LOL – in Egypt has issued yet another fatwa against Muslims using Facebook. In other news, Muslims continue to use Facebook.
A military study shows that there is some issue of sexual confusion or identity questioning among Afghan men, centering around the penchant of some Afghan men for little Afghan boys, as well as hott gay butt seks with each other Not that this is news to anyone who … well, come on, who didn’t know this stuff?
The New York Times Magazine did a very long story about Alabama-born & raised terrorist Abu Mansour al Amrikee aka Omar Hammami, who I’ve mentioned here in the past.
There are so many similarities, so many parallels to the general mood and the dominance of Salafism in the 90s — I guess it took a little longer for that shit to reach Mobile — that it was a little scary. You think “There but for the grace of my own rational faculties go I.” I thought about how many men, women and children have been irrevocably scarred and damaged by their experiences with these same folk – and most of them didn’t even go as far as Hammami and his buddy Danny-boy. (Isn’t it funny how these connections to Daniel Maldonado and Sas Jamal keep surfacing, as with the Tarek Mehanna story?) They made “hijrah” or dropped out of “kufr university” or married their daughters off at 15 and lived in abject, but holy, pious, self-righteous poverty – for the sake of allah. How much damage the likes of Tony “Abu Khaliyl” Sylvester wreaked upon the minds and hearts of well meaning, sincere people who just wanted to get closer to their god, and until – and only until – someone goes completely overboard like Hammami, then no one pays attention or holds them responsible for the things they have done to people in the name of their god.
I recommended the Miss Kelly blog the other day in a post on Aafia Siddiqui, and I still do if you’re interested in Islamism in the United States, particularly Boston. For whatever reason, Boston seems to have been a hub of jihobbiyists in the 90s and today. Miss Kelly has a very extensive and useful archive of posts and links regarding Islamism in the US, esp. Boston.
I’m wondering if the reason Boston comes off more as “Terror Hub” than “Hub City” is because the many elite colleges attract international students, who attract international money and international speakers / daiyees (like the Masood family). On the other hand, not all of the Boston-area jihobbyists came to the city through university – Tarek Mehanna, Daniel Maldonado, and that Abou Samra kid come to mind. They are regular guys who grew up in the suburbs of Boston, not people who came there as adults after 12 years of indoctrination in one of those exotic Muslim countries. In other words, they got all that shit right here at home – esp. Maldonado who is a convert.
Miss Kelly highlighted my initial post about the crazy Lady of Al Qaida, Aafia Siddiqui. Towards the end of my stay in Islam, the “Grey Lady of Bagram” became a cause celebre thanks to that other crazy Muslim lady, Yvonne Ridley. The things that made me pack up my bags and leave were issues of theology, but things like this didn’t help, because with every case of yet another Muslim accused of doing something to bring harm to our country and our people (or England and her people, etc), the Muslims would scream “witch hunt” and “Jew frame job” and I would be left thinking, “Am I the only one who see that this is probably true, and that Muslims should start worrying about how to get rid of this shit in our community?”
Apparently I was.
(Part of me wonders if Ridley will come to her senses in another 5 or 10 years and then make a living peddling shrill stories about Muslims…)
In Europe, a woman who wrote a play exploring the effects of Islamism on Algerian women’s lives, has been brutally attacked. Sheltering peace, people. Remember, Islam is totally compatible with free speech – until that speech criticises Islam or Muslims.
Crazy bitch (or pretending to be crazy) Aafia Siddiqui has gone on trial and immediately marked the occasion with drama. She’s been taken out of the court, and has been screaming and carrying on about Joooooz in the courtroom. One might say she’s making a play for an insanity defense (which is not nearly as effective in real life as on TV), but think about it. She’s a hardcore Islamist and relative to one of the most notorious terrorists in the world (Khalid Sheikh Muhammad) through her marriage to terrorist Ammar al Baluchi — insane anti-Semitism is ingrained in her and is not only perfectly normal for her, it’s a mark of piety. The fact that she went to Brandeis means nothing; she also didn’t wear hijab in her graduation photos. So what? It’s obvious she got taqwafied later on. More about the Lady of al Qaida here at Miss Kelly’s.
This story is breaking my heart and making me sick to my stomach. Authorities in Saudi Arabia have sentenced a 13 year old girl to 90 lashes and 2 mos in prison for the crime of bringing a mobile phone into school.
There is NOTHING else I can say about this. NOTHING.
My blog and the post “How to Quit Islam” are featured at Carnival of the godless #133. There are other posts on different topics from other godless bloggers, so run over and check it out.
That was the title of one of those widely distributed dawahganda pamphlets back in the day. Thousands of those pamphlets were given out on college campuses, at mosques, in neighborhoods, and so forth.
This, my friends, is the reality of Islam’s “sheltering peace for women.” Not every husband is like this guy – beating his wife senseless. Most of them aren’t. But everything else he’s saying in the interview (the husband’s interview starts after the segment with the wife) is what is taught in the mosque, in fiqh books, in halaqahs, lectures, and so forth. And not just of the salafi variety either.
Vjack of Atheist Revolution has this post on why he focuses on Christianity rather than Islam. I’m glad he does, but I don’t know if the reasons he gives are the reasons why atheist blogging on Islam is sometimes off base.
I’ve seen posts about Islam on atheist blogs before, as well as atheist forums. My problem is this: athiests usually don’t know what the heck they’re talking about anymore than Christian preachers when it comes to Islam. So you go to read a post and verses are taken out of context – presented in a way that no Muslim, even radical extremists, would view and understand those verses. Cultural practices are confused with “shariah law.” Sometimes people mix up their supposed desire to criticise Islam with racist tropes (and too, sometimes it seems that some atheist bloggers don’t understand that criticism of Islam is often folded in extremely racist or ethnocentric language, hence the wariness of some ex-Muslims and Muslims to engage in debate). They don’t know how to recognize valid sources from others who have an agenda. They often don’t even know what a Muslim would consider “the basics;” for example, a lot of these bloggers seem to have never heard of the sunnah or what it means. People might know that there is such a difference as sunni / shiah but they don’t know about wahabi, salafi, the madhabs, jaafariya, ismaili, zaydi, progressive, la-hadither, and so on. A lot of them trot out that meme about sufism being a “tolerant and mystical third way,” as though it is not wholly part of both sunni and shiah Islam. They don’t know what tariqas are. They don’t know how to recognize subcultural or political or religious affiliations and leanings by looking at someone’s dress or what is hanging on their walls. There isn’t Islam. There are Islams.
People think they can take what they understand about some types of Christianity and apply those understandings to Islam, with maybe a dash of ideas about Orthodox Judaism thrown in. I have had people (not Muslim obviously) tell this to me before – that it’s Christianity, but with a few elements switched out. Respectfully, just because they all claim to be worshiping the same invisible being doesn’t mean that even their concepts of god are the same, let alone their understandings of power or the world. Understanding Christianity does not mean that you even remotely understand anything about Islam, and it’s sort of … what? Christ0-centric or Eurocentric to assume that Christianity (or the version passed on from western Europe) is the default lens through which one views either all other religions or at least the other Abrahamic religions.
I’ve seen in the past some ex-Muslim bloggers try to make connections with the bigger secular / atheist blogging world, and it seems to have failed. Kafir Girl made the blogrolls of some people, but I wonder if that wasn’t more due to her mockery of the quran than their real understanding of what a radical thing she was doing, or a desire to give precious space to the voices of ex-Muslims. Unreasonable Faith has had some posts or linked to posts by an ex-Muslim; those posts have since left the internet. I understand that Muslims in general – real Muslims, not caricatures or bin Ladin – fly under the radar of western people – atheist or otherwise – let alone ex-Muslims. Maybe they don’t even think about us existing, let alone blogging.
As I have said before, a lot of ex-Muslim blogs have gone silent in the last year or so. We are losing stories and voices, but the wider atheist internet is also losing the voices of people who can decode Islam for them, who can speak about and teach about Islam from a knowledgable and secular viewpoint. We have the support of one another, but a lot of ex-Muslims seem to move on after a year or two, their interest in things religious or Islamic decreasing dramatically. For those who are interested in plugging away, as I am, the support and acknowledgment of the wider atheist internet becomes imperative – maybe. I have to admit I am intimidated by some of these people, and have been repulsed by some of the ignorant, racist, sexist things I’ve read on atheist blogs and on atheist forums; I would dislike having those people come here and spread their bullshit.
Anyway, this is why I have joined the atheist blogroll, although I think with a name that isn’t obvious (Musings of an Ex-Muslim!!!), I probably won’t get a lot of traffic from it. I’ve submitted some posts to the Carnival of the Godless — we’ll see how that works out for me. Again, I encourage all you ex-Muslims out there to blog, or write comments here, as well as engaging others on secular / atheist blogs on the topic of Islam.
There is a new study (PDF) out from Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill that purports to show that Muslims in America have taken significant steps to oppose the teaching of terrorism in their communities. Sunni Islam, it is important for my non-Muslim readers to know, does not teach taqiyah as a tenet, which is what anti-Islamic activists claim. Most people don’t even know such a concept exists in the religion. Even shia do not practice it nearly as often as sunnis (and anti-Islamic activists) claim. However, in reality, it is practiced without a name being given to it. It’s called not exposing your problems to the kufar, it’s called “they won’t understand and will misconstrue and twist these beliefs about war and non-Muslims, so claim that you don’t believe them”. It’s called walaa and baraa, having loyalty to the Muslims at all costs, even if it means lying, and it’s called hadith of the prophet that “war is deception” and it’s called the fact that traditionally, dawah was classified as a form of jihad, or war. It’s called dawahganda – that it is okay to lie and mislead as long as it leads people to believe in Islam or at least see Islam in a positive light. Reading some of the claims from Muslims, notably our salafi friends, is like an exercise in textbook taqiyah. Prepare to gag.
The authors note that with the arrest of 139 Muslim Americans over the years for terror related activities, “homegrown terrorism is a serious, but limited, problem.”
It is true, and I have said this before, that the majority of Muslims are like the majority of any other people. They don’t want to hurt those who don’t hurt them, they want to be free to pursue the regular life in peace, they don’t want to go through the strife of wars and bombings and everything else, and so we don’t have much to fear from them.
And it’s important to point out – and studies like this often don’t do so – that the majority of Muslims don’t attend mosques, they probably don’t pray all 5 times a day, they don’t eat only Islamically slaughtered meat, they don’t cover their heads, they don’t wear long beards, they don’t read surat al kahf every Friday and surat ikhlas before bed, they don’t utter the special prayers for going to the bathroom or having sex or putting on a new shirt, and all of the other many, many minute commands that shape the daily life of a religious Muslim. And they don’t read the books or listen to the lectures and Friday sermons that extol the warrior virtues of Islam, that assert that Muhammad was a “real man” because he went out on the battle field. Most Muslims, even religious ones, have a very slight and distant knowledge of seerah, let alone Islamic history. They’re Muslims because their fathers were Muslim or because they need to be Muslim in order to get married to the person they loved or even because they believe but they’re not about to take away time from enjoying life in order to pray 5 times a day, shun non-believers as friends, and severely restrict their career options.
This is good – THIS IS WHAT WE WANT. But it’s important to remember that these are not the Muslims who are hanging around in the mosques and the communities. They don’t know the imams, the imams don’t know them.
What’s happened – and this is just my opinion as an observer from within Muslim communities – is that religious Muslims have de-radicalized and that the self-appointed leadership has engaged in an effort to shift their own focus (and hence, the agenda given to Muslims through sermons etc) to other concerns. One can say, for example, that the “Amerikkka is the Great Shaytan” sermons have almost completely gone away. What researchers like that should know (and I suspect at least two of them do know this) is that these sermons weren’t the exclusive property of “those crazy African American salafis” or “politicized, rural immigrants” (the two favorite straw men / fall guys of the leadership) but that they were given in masjids representing different and diverse versions of Islam and Muslims.
It’s hard for me to feel much sympathy for the report’s consistent claims that Muslims feel persecuted and victimized. Being victims is a central tenet of Muslim identity, ome that is coupled with externalizing blame for the wrongdoings and failures of Muslims (powerful ones and regular ones alike). For example, when a Muslim man is known to be running around sleeping with anything that moves, many Muslims will instead place the blame on women, esp. non Muslim women, who don’t wear the hijab. Hijab itself is about women taking on the responsibility of men’s sexual urges. America, the UK, Israel, the Saudi regime, the Muslim dictators, landlords, bosses, neighbors, priests and preachers, Hollywood and Bollywood – all these people and more are responsible for oppressing Muslims in ways big and small, and you can hear this shit from a Muslim in Casablanca, or one in Dhaka or one in Houston.
The report mentions, for example, that some Islamic charities were closed in the wake of 9/11 and that is one thing that has contributed to Muslims feeling “insecure” in the US. Well, maybe they should. Those charities were funneling Muslims’ money to groups like Hamas. It wasn’t the FBI that did these things – it was Muslims who did it. Yet, to suggest to Muslims that their anger should be directed at charities that misrepresented their cause and took money meant for one thing and gave it to other, illegal things, is a heresy in the Muslim community. Even after the trials, convictions, and plea agreements admitting guilt, you will be hard pressed to find an “average religious Muslim” who thinks that Holy Land Foundation, Benevolence International, Al Haramain, Care International, Sami al Arian, and many others did anything wrong. In these cases and others, Muslims were found guilty by a jury of their peers or pled guilty to things like providing material support to terrorist organizations. Am I supposed to feel sad because oher Muslims then claim to feel alienated when those organizations are shut down? Or do people mean, and I think this is it, that the government should not bother with Muslim charities who give money to these groups overseas – even if it is illegal – because people do think Hamas is “right” to wage war against Israel (by any means necessary) or because they see it as something that “does not involve Americans?” After all, here are plenty of religious Muslims in America who like our laws just fine and like their life here, but firmly believe that all Muslim countries should be ruled by shariah – and that the Muslim citizens of those countries who don’t want that have no business being against shariah.
I want to add that it’s not American people who have made any assimilation difficult for religious Muslims. It’s religious Muslims who did that to themselves. Religious Muslims believe, and are taught, that they should dress and eat differently. They are taught by their shaykhs that they should have “arrogance with the kufar.” They are taught that non-Muslims are, if not inferior, than extremely misguided and followers of evil for their refusal to submit to allah. Irreligious and secular Muslims who celebrate Christmas, don’t eat zabihah, etc. are denigrated and called names and held up as an example of what it means to anger allah. I have known many, many Muslims in my life who make it a point to make a display of their religiosity when invited to an office Christmas party or asked what their kids did for Halloween, or given a bottle of wine as a gift, or asked to share food at a pot-luck and any number of similar things. If anyone needs to be blamed for religious Muslims’ difficulty in integrating, it’s their shaykhs and leaders, and not the average American person — although Americans need to take responsibility for their own ignorance and biases that may drive their own mistreatment of Muslims.
I thought it was ironic that of the four communities they studied, two of them were Houston and Buffalo. American ex-Muslims, you know that those two cities are synonymous in the minds of many Muslims with radical or salafi / wahabi and Deobandi teachings and far out sentiments.
Maybe the problem here is that “extremist” and “radical” are equated only to “wanting to blow up malls in Kansas,” and not with teaching that Jews are descended from apes and pigs and will be the armies of the anti-Christ at the end of time, that gays should be killed, the apostates should be killed, that blasphemers should be killed, that people who engage in sex outside of marriage should be whipped or killed, that women are second-class citizens, that polygamy can and should be practiced without regard to the feelings of the first wife – or of the law (in fact, I have heard imams counsel their communities to call 2nd & 3rd wives their “girlfriends” as a way of avoiding any charges of bigamy). And hey, a LOT of religious Muslims believe these things but refuse to act on it because sunni Islam has such a negative view on enacting the shariah without the presence of a legitimate caliph in place. In other words, the reason a religious Muslim doesn’t go out and kill a blasphemer isn’t because he thinks “live and let live” it’s because the US is not under the proper Islamic authority for that to be done.
I can’t continue picking this apart. It was bad enough reading it. Anyway, I support, by any means necessary, people creating a liberal Islam and a “cafeteria Islam” where they pick and choose what suits them and what matches their (deep down inside where they can’t acknowledge it) belief in secular human rights.
