WISDOM FROM A MODERATE MUSLIM

Jake Nichols of the Planet Jackson Hole rag has conducted an interview of some vital interest and intensity. From his insider understanding of the terrorist mentality, Dr. Tawfik Hamid predicted the destruction of the Twin Towers (9-11), Madrid bombings, and London attacks. Now his stated mission has become to speak out against radical Islam as a cancer that is spreading with frightening rapidity across the globe today. A courageous as well as scholarly initiator of Islamic reformation, Dr. Hamid seeks to build new thinking within Islam to overcome the hatred and violent extremism that have metastasized within his religious tradition as he states: "in order to make LOVE prevail you should defeat Hatred!"

Read on...

Jackson Hole, WY - Dr. Tawfik Hamid, 47, was born in Egypt to an agnostic father and liberal French mother. As a student at Cairo University medical school in the late 1970s, Dr. Hamid joined a radical Islamic group and became, in essence, a budding terrorist.

He has since eschewed violent teachings of the Qur’an and other Islamic texts and has embraced a new and more peaceful interpretation of the Muslim faith which he has developed and encouraged by authoring several books and lecturing worldwide. Dr. Hamid believes changing the Muslim religion from within is the only way to ensure world peace.

“It is the only hope to a long term solution to the problem and not just a recipe approach or a symptomatic treatment for the disease,” the doctor told the Planet during a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “I want to treat the disease from its roots so that we guarantee that it does not come again in the future.”

While Dr. Hamid preaches a peaceful interpretation of the Qur’an, his suggestions for dealing with radical Islamists have been accused of pouring gasoline on the fire. He often defends his position by saying the western world and America is too worried about seeming “Islamaphobic.”

“Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it!” he said. “They’re slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can’t you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want?”

Planet Jackson Hole: You claim you were approached in college by the man who is now considered Bin Laden’s lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He got you involved in a rather radical Muslim group called Jamaat Islamiyah. Describe the process.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid: It was a group inside the medical school itself and it was legal back then. We used to have three masques: One relatively peaceful, another a bit more aggressive, and Jamaat Islamiyah. Approximately 3 percent of the students at the school were members of Jamaat Islamiyah. You go to pray with them. They put your name on some sort of list. You sign and are considered a member. It was a group that prepared you, indoctrinated you, with the violent teachings.

PJH: The indoctrination process has been likened to a “brainwashing.” You, yourself, have detailed stages—Stage I: creating hatred toward non-believers; Stage II: eliminating empathy or sympathy toward the pain and suffering of others; Stage III: accepting or using violence against others. How far did they suck you in … and how?

TH: When you are motivated by religious beliefs [they] can be used by some people to suppress your ability to do critical thinking. They did this to me by using certain verses and certain tactics. For example, they liked to use a phrase, ‘If you think, you become an infidel.’ So they use tactics that make it difficult for you to question or think. They say to you, ‘This is the will of Allah. You cannot negotiate with God and you have to just obey blindly whatever he says to you.’

PJH: And the process is subtle?

TH: The process is gradual. One day I prayed with them and they asked us to stand in queues with no separation or gaps in between our shoulders and our feet. This was intentionally done to make us feel as if we were at war. To quote the Qur’anic verse: “God loves those who fight for his cause as if they are one cemented or solid structure with no gaps between them.”

So they put you in the Jihadi mind. You start to feel like you are a soldier, not just someone who is worshipping God. You are a part of a system that is declaring war on non-believers or infidels. In fact, they use the power of hellfire very effectively. The Qur’an describes the hellfire in very poetic and powerful [imagery], with great detail in the torture tactics.

PJH: And I have never heard anyone but you mention this, but there is the use of sexual deprivation on young recruits, adolescent males, at a time in their lives when their bodies are raging with testosterone.

TH: Many students are unable to have any sexual relationships because marriage was very costly and very difficult while they are students. Extramarital relationships are very difficult in this culture and strongly prohibited. So, on one hand you have this sexual frustration, on the other hand you have a description of paradise full of ladies and women waiting for you there. This creates some distortion in our minds and many of the students back then were truly dreaming about going to paradise; dying for Allah as a martyr or shahid, and go to paradise to have these ladies up there.

PJH: How does this apply to women suicide bombers, who are now starting to become more prevalent, where you used to never hear of such a thing? What are they promised, Chippendales and fat-free ice cream?

TH: Look, the dream of going to God and the paradise and to die in martyrdom or shahid is actually in the mind of many women including my wife. She used to dream about dying as a martyr to go to paradise.

But the dream for women is a little different. Women are affected by the fear of hell more than desire in having sexual things in paradise. There are words of the prophet Mohammed which are not Qur’anic but are generally accepted by most Muslims, that says most of the people in hell are women. The women are generally afraid of going to hell because the torture tactics are clearly described in the Qur’an.

PJH: But you got out. You are not hiding in a cave with al-Zawahiri. You are here in the U.S. and a devotee of a kinder Islam.

TH: I reached that level [Stage III] and what happened was a certain event. There was a big party in the medical school. It was an innocent party but the Jamaat Islamiyah saw it as un-Islamic, so they gathered in the hundreds, more than a thousand, actually, and they prayed in the middle of the school showing power and chanting, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and threatening to stop this innocent party by violence. On this day, I was standing beside someone who was the leader of the fourth group of the Jamaat Islamiyah and he was planning with other people to kidnap one of the police officers and bury him alive. To dig a grave beside the mosque and bury the man alive.

And I just thought this was too much for me. It awakened my conscious and I felt there was something fundamentally wrong here and I started to think, which was the opposite of what they told me. And when I started to think, the whole process started backwards and I started to develop a new interpretation for the Qur’an and the Islamic teaching. This was the triggering factor. I found some Qur’anic verses that encouraged me to tell the truth even if it was against my culture.

PJH: You have described al-Zawahiri as a fiercest speaker you have ever heard.

TH: He is a man of great conviction. There is no doubt he believed in what he was saying. He was not doing it to gain money or wealth—he was from a relatively wealthy family. He was a very intelligent person. He had a great future in Egypt if he continued in the Arab world as a doctor.

It’s like Bin Laden, who was a billionaire and left everything to go to live in the mountains of Afghanistan. He left a five-star hotel to live there. So these people are truly convinced in what they are doing. Plus, if they have that charisma, like al-Zawahiri, he can just blow you away and you feel that you are totally captivated by his form of teachings that are very, very inflammatory and very powerful at the same time.

PJH: If we locked the both of you in a room...

TH: [Chuckles]

PJH: … and waited to see whose interpretation of the Qur’an would prevail, what would happen? Who would convince who?

TH: I will tell you, my views can be very convincing but his views are supported by a lot of other scholars and, also, he would use violence against me. So for me to use convincing here would not be very … well, let’s say, I would try to convince him and he would try to kill me.

PJH: Which leads me to some of the more controversial aspects of your lectures, Doctor. You have said HAMAS must be crushed militarily. Economic pressure must be forced on Saudi Arabia. You encourage western civilization to meet terrorists’ violence with violence. Would that be a fair assessment?

TH: With MORE violence, sometimes.

We have a recent example in history with the Nazis and the Emperor of Japan. We couldn’t change the ideology of the Nazis or the Japanese by peace or love or harmony or mutual understanding. The change in their educational system and their ideology happened only after their military defeat. You give your enemy a powerful military defeat, then you will be able to change their education.

This is what I’m suggesting here with HAMAS. The problem with Israel, for example, is they use what I call ‘a moderate dose of antibiotics’ which does not kill the infection, it just gives the wrong impression that the antibiotics are not working. What I’m saying is if you are going to use power in the military against the violence of barbarians like this, then you have to use sufficient power to suppress them. As long as you are using this moderate dose of power, the problem will remain a chronic problem. This might be viewed as very aggressive but, unfortunately, this is what history teaches us. In [the cases of] Hitler and Japan, the world used sufficient power to devastate them and the war was ended and peace happened after that. It was not peace with Hitler and Japan that brought peace. It was military power.

PJH: A little peace upside their head, eh?

TH: But it has to be devastating. It cannot be moderate military power; otherwise the war can continue forever.

PJH: And in the case of Saudi Arabia, it doesn’t help that, as a nation, we’re hooked on their oil.

TH: Of course. It’s a waste of your time if you try to use military might. What is needed is some type of economic pressure to push them toward modality. I’m not an advocate of sudden change of structure of the system there. Some people advocate immediate democracy or the changing of the government’s mind. My belief is this can create chaos like what’s happening in Iraq.

I believe it would be more wise to use their political leaders, some of whom are relatively pro-American, and cooperate with them and give them expertise and assist them in some way or another and work together to defeat radical Islam, which is also a threat to them. It’s like a chess match—one step at a time. Creating democracy now, before defeating radical Islam, can just invite an Islam which can cause more trouble for the world.

PJH: On Glenn Beck’s television show, you got into it a little bit with CAIR’s (Council on American-Islamic Relations) Ahmed Bedier. What happened there?

TH: It’s something we all need to recognize. You cannot call a person a moderate if he believes he should kill apostates or he allows the beating of women and stoning them to death, or allows slavery to come back again, or uses war against non-Muslims to subjugate them to Islam, or calls Jews “pigs and monkeys.” You can’t consider this a moderate person or organization.

What I am trying to do is propose a real treatment to the problem. To provide a new or alternative interpretation to the Islamic text which is feasible because the Arabic language is very flexible; you can interpret at the literal level or even metaphoric level.

PJH: You have a unique, insider’s understanding of the jihadist, the terrorist. You say you knew America would be hit two years before the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. You saw it coming.

TH: As a simple observer, I saw the growth of Islamism and the violence and I could tell, at the end of this curve, they will start attacking in the West. It was obvious. They declared war against the western civilization and their freedoms, especially the freedom of women, and they hated to their guts any sort of liberal values.

I knew this cancer was growing and it was sure to hit the west but where to hit? You have, in the Arab culture, a proverb that means, “It is better to attack the most powerful, so that the weaker ones become afraid of you.” So they chose America because it’s the most powerful country.

Now, why New York City? Because, based on a Qur’an verse that says, “Whatever they do to tease the infidels or cause them pain, they will be rewarded by Allah for this.” So they chose New York City because they believed it would cause maximum pain to America because it is the capital of money and the symbolism of the twin towers would be most damaging.

PJH: Do salafist or fundamentalist Islam and radical Islam have to mean the same thing?

TH: A fundamentalist is someone who doesn’t want to shake hands with women. He will force his wife and daughter to wear the hijab. They don’t allow TV in their homes. It’s more within. The effect of it is within. Radical Islam is outside. It’s forcing others to believe. It’s using violence against Christians in order to subjugate them to Islam. They are really two faces to the same coin.

PJH: It sounds like a radical is a fundamentalist who takes up jihad.

TH: Yeah.

PJH: Let’s talk about how your views apply to our current political scene and the race for presidency. Barack Obama, for instance, has made no bones about how he would seek face-to-face meetings with leaders in the Arab world that we have struggled with. Will that be effective?

TH: That will never work. In fact, it will actually aggravate the problem. I’ll give you an example. In the cartoon [depiction] of the prophet Mohammed, for example. When the cartoon was published, it was the 30th of September, 2005. Until four months later, January 2006, there were no violent demonstrations, okay? On the day when the Danish magazine [Jyllands-Posten] apologized—this was the 30th of January, 2006—within 48 hours, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the world.

That is the phenomenon; that you show weakness and withdrawal with these people and they actually think of attacking you more. They attacked you in Kenya and Tanzania on your embassies in 1998. Your reaction was weak. This weakness encouraged them to attack you again.

So in trying to negotiate with the jihadists or radicals without losing your freedom is [impossible]. [Both] al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden said to you, “Convert to Islam or we will declare war on you.” This is a simple, clear issue that has been stated by the leaders of al-Qaida and has been repeated over and over. So why don’t you believe them? It is crystal clear; they are not ready to negotiate. They just want your submission.

[Obama] might be interested to negotiate but they are not. And you cannot negotiate with yourself. It’s just dreams. And I can see some people in the political field, especially, in my view, some of the liberal left; they live in dreams rather than reality. This approach, these politicians, I believe, will just bring more catastrophes to the world.

PROGRESS IN THE AIR

From the New York Post writer Irshad Manji:

Last week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology."

Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister. So far, those arrested in connection to the car bombs are, by and large, medical professionals. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge grievance has many champions of compassion scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, disenfranchised, and resentful about both?

We should have been stripped of that breezy simplification by now. The 9/11 hijackers came from means. Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, pursuing his post-graduate studies in Germany. No servile goat-herder, that one.

In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad Al Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. A physician himself, Dr. Al Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."

In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. And, time and again, the very people committing these acts have articulated what that something else is: their religion.

Consider Mohammad Sidique Khan, the teaching assistant who master minded the July 7, 2005, transit bombings in London.

In a taped testimony, Khan railed against British foreign policy. But before bringing up Western imperialism, he emphasized that "Islam is our religion" and "the Prophet is our role model." Khan gave priority to God, not to Iraq.

Now take Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch-born Moroccan Muslim who murdered Amsterdam film director Theo van Gogh. Bouyeri pumped several bullets into van Gogh's body. Knowing that multiple shots would finish off his victim, why didn't Bouyeri stop there? Why did he pull out a blade to decapitate van Gogh?

Again, we must confront religious symbolism. The blade is an implement associated with 7th-century tribal conflict. Wielding it as a sword becomes a tribute to the founding moment of Islam. Even the note stabbed into van Gogh's corpse, although written in Dutch, had the unmistakable rhythms of Arabic poetry.

Let's credit Bouyeri with honesty: At his trial he proudly acknowledged acting from "religious conviction."

Despite integrating Muslims far more adroitly than most of Europe, North America isn't immune. Last year in Toronto, police nabbed 17 young Muslim men allegedly plotting to blow up Canada's parliament buildings and behead the prime minister. They called their campaign "Operation Badr," a reference to the Battle of Badr, the first decisive military triumph achieved by the Prophet Mohammed. Clearly, the Toronto 17 drew inspiration from religious history.

For people with big hearts and good will, this has to be uncomfortable to hear. But they can take solace that the law-and-order types have a hard time with it, too. After rounding up the Toronto suspects, police held a press conference and didn't once mention Islam or Muslims. At their second press conference, police boasted about avoiding those words.

If the guardians of public safety intended their silence to be a form of sensitivity, they instead accomplished a form of artistry, airbrushing the role that religion plays in the violence carried out under its banner.

They’re in fine company: Moderate Muslims do the same.

While the vast majority of Muslims aren't extremists, a more important distinction must start being made - the distinction between moderate Muslims and reform-minded ones. Moderate Muslims denounce violence in the name of Islam—but deny that Islam has anything to do with it.

By their denial, moderates abandon the ground of theological interpretation to those with malignant intentions—effectively telling would-be terrorists that they can get away with abuses of power because mainstream Muslims won't challenge the fanatics with bold, competing interpretations.

To do so would be admit that religion is a factor. Moderate Muslims can't go there.

Reform-minded Muslims say it's time to admit that Islam's scripture and history are being exploited. They argue for re-interpretation precisely to put the would-be terrorists on notice that their monopoly is over. Re-interpreting doesn't mean re-writing. It means re-thinking words and practices that already exist—removing them from a seventh-century tribal time warp and introducing them to a twenty first-century pluralistic context.

Un-Islamic? God no. The Koran contains three times as many verses calling on Muslims to think, analyze, and reflect than passages that dictate what's absolutely right or wrong. In that sense, reform-minded Muslims are as authentic as moderates, and quite possibly more constructive.

Irshad Manji is a senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy, the creator of the PBS documentary "Faith Without Fear" and author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith." From TNR.com, the Web site of The New Republic.

A MUSLIM REFORMER?

There's news that the rather quiet "moderate" Muslims indeed have hope in their future. And imagine this: that hope is coming from France. Former Marseilles Mufti Soheib Bencheikh has announced that "Islam must be criticized, just as Christianity was [criticized] during the Enlightenment." He goes on to say that "Islam is a message for all humanity&$151;therefore it is not the property of Muslims [alone]."

Born in Saudi Arabia in 1961, Dr. Bencheikh believes that French-style secularism is a necessary precondition for the reform of Islam, and he calls on both Muslims and non-Muslims to participate in critiquing Islam, reinterpreting its holy texts, combating fundamentalism, and helping Islam adapt to the modern era.

Believing that Islam—which was founded with an emphasis on tribal society— has become obsolete, Bencheikh points out that the virilent form of political Islam sweeping the globe today is heresy and can be traced back to the 1960s, a time when most of the Muslim countries began modernizing politically and militarily, while retaining a rigid grip on the general population.

Read more. And let's hope that this special voice of reason survives an almost certain fatwa once the Muslim street catches wind of this criticism of their death cult.

Others will still say that reform is not the answer. Reading about Muslims making conciliatory statements may feel encouraging. After all, the Muslim world is not monolithic. Many decent men, women and children live in dar al-Islam and would be fine citizens under non-Islamic forms of governance.

Unfortunately, Islam itself will not allow them to flourish. It's improbable that Islam can undergo anything resembling a Reformation. Islam is inflexible and rigid as a system, has no non-violent and spiritual role model like Jesus of Nazareth at the center of its belief system and is devoid of appeals to higher ethical standards, like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. It lacks reflection, personal responsibility, free will and empathy.

Islam can't be bent into something new.

It's encouraging to hear that some people will openly question the motives and opportunism of the radicalized. But once the chatter starts it is doubtful to stop at a 'kinder, gentler Islam' or 'Islam as a billion points of light'.

Instead, a vigorous backlash could show the Dhimmi West just how serious these "true believers" are about pushing Israel into the sea, ransacking Europe, posting the Islamic flag on the White House lawn, and destroying the infidel wherever he finds them. Islam as it is written in the Koran is more than a religion. It reads clearly as a poliical ideology with a doctrine of Caliphite commanding Muslims to fight to establish a world of Islam controlled by an Islamic capital.

But by all means, let's do try reform before all hell breaks loose.

May God bless us all...