Revolutions, as journalists and politicians tend to forget, rarely follow the scripts set for them.

They are co-opted – as Iran’s revolution against the shah was by the clerics. Others, like the Ukraine’s orange revolution – or Georgia’s rose one, revert to a kind of business as usual, with one brand of authoritarianism and elite self-interest replaced by a new model.

It is not entirely surprising. England’s period of “revolutionary” politics during the civil war and after was long drawn-out competition between parliamentary authority and the monarchy, and the French revolution was equally drawn out.

Egypt’s post-revolutionary period that has followed the fall of Hosni Mubarak 14 months ago – if it is really appropriate to affix “post” to it at all – has seen a similar struggle for political ascendency between rival forces and competing ideas.

A few months ago the story, as it was across the country’s of the Arab spring, was of the inevitable, unstoppable rise of the Islamist parties and what that meant. Now, as Egypt prepares for presidential elections a couple of weeks away, what is most interesting is how Egypt’s most potent political organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest winner in the parliament, appears to be struggling in the presidential campaign.

While many of the polls appear to be of limited value, in one respect they seem to reflect a reality – that the campaign of the Brotherhood’s official candidate, Mohamed Morsi, is not going very well at all when compared with his former-Brotherhood rival Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, and former Arab League general secretary Amr Moussa.

It is not just Morsi’s lack of personal appeal, or his message in rallies that has become ever more conservative and religious as he has sought to reassure core Brotherhood voters. If the Brotherhood is in difficulty, it is because it appears unable to find a way to effectively talk to both of the contradictory themes coming out of an Egyptian society still dominated by the military in post-Mubarak era. There is, in Egypt, a desire for a return to some kind of political and economic stability that is married in large parts of the population with a profound fear that what Egypt’s future holds is another brand of authoritarianism, not least through a strong and continuing military rule or influence.

Critics of the Brotherhood from all sectors of Egypt’s political spectrum, from regime remnants to nationalists of Nasserite bent, to secular revolutionaries and conservative Salafists, all pick up on the same themes.

I spoke to a Salafist leader from the Al-Nour party last week, the parliamentary deputy speaker Ashraf Thabet, he was careful to set out the stall of his party, which has backed Morsi’s rival Aboul Fotouh. It was clear that the Salafists seek to change society not through winning and commanding the top of power – like the Brotherhood – but by activism at the bottom of the “pyramid”. This is a reflection of the suspicion that has come to cling around the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice party in the past six months. It is not only, its critics fear, too centralising of power and organisation, but also suspected of doing deals with the general to achieve its political aims.

While some remain suspicious of how far behind Aboul Fotouh has left his Brotherhood roots since giving up his membership last year to run for president, what is clear is that one reason that he is enjoying his present success is that he manages to share their fundamental values in an essentially conservative Muslim country while having separated himself from the Brotherhood’s leadership structure.

It is possible too that the cold feet among many over the Brotherhood’s official candidate reflect something more subtle and encouraging in Egyptian politics. Perhaps it is an innate reflection of a general mood in a country which has yet to draw up a constitution delineating the future checks and balances of power, that it is better to avoid allowing one party to monopolise the political institutions.

What can one conclude from all this? Simply that Egypt’s revolution continues to evolve. The Muslim Brotherhood, after a catalogue of recent errors and missteps, will have to evolve as well.

SOURCE:the guardian

In a show of force, members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI) broke up a book launch and discussion featuring Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji at the Salihara Cultural Center in Jakarta on May 5. It was said that the FPI accused Manji of violating a primary tenet of Islam by promoting homosexuality.

Viewing the incident in a bigger picture, the unjustified action is linked to a series of efforts initiated by Muslim hard-liners in the last few decades to circumscribe and restrict the intellectual activities focusing on Islamic matters.

It is not an atypical case that these vigilantes would exert physical force and violence to intimidate or dissolve public discussions, seminars, lectures and book launches. The situation is, of course, unfriendly to any intellectual and academic activity.

The 2005 Indonesian Ulema Council’s (MUI) edict prohibiting secularism, liberalism and pluralism has been widely used by the hard-line groups to justify unlawful actions.

Regardless of the diverse philosophical understandings and political implications, the edict narrow-mindedly defined those “-isms” as potentially corroding the holy and sacred essence of Islam. Put simply, the edict itself epitomises this anti-intellectualism, which clearly violates the freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the primary features of a democratic society.

Surprisingly, these intolerant efforts seem to gain lots of sympathy from the wider Indonesian Muslim community. The general but ahistorical attitude embraced by the majority of Muslims to treat Islam
as a final, fixed and single entity since it was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad 14 centuries ago is
considered the major cause of this predisposition.

It supposes that any action accounted for a violation of the basic tenets of Islam should be automatically banned.

On the contrary, any action in the name of Islam, though convincingly conducted against the law and/or violently attacking the rights of others, is likely to be permitted.

It can be exemplified by the different fates of the FPI and the Liberal Islamic Network (JIL). The two are now a binary icon depicting the conservative and the progressive groups fighting against each other in the contemporary Indonesian Muslim community.

The FPI has been blamed for numerous unlawful and violent attacks and public intimidation against people or things defined as un-Islamic or the enemy of Islam, while the JIL has been accused by the public as a trouble-maker through its dissemination of controversial ideas questioning Islam as the perfect way of life.

The fate of the two groups can be examined on the basis of two public movements against them spread earlier this year, Indonesia Tanpa FPI (Indonesia without FPI) and Indonesia Tanpa JIL (Indonesia without JIL).

The former was fading away as quickly as the latter emerged and gained massive support from the majority of Indonesian Muslims. Despite the fact that members of the JIL have never been charged with any crimes or unlawful actions, numerous mass rallies and cyber campaigns were launched against them.

It is suffice to say that the fact illustrates the recent domination of religious conservatism, which undoubtedly would restrain the development of Islamic intellectualism in Indonesia.

The attempts to reform and revitalize such obsolete Islamic doctrines in accordance with the religious plurality and societal modernity of Indonesia would easily be deemed as an act of heresy.

The efforts to repress religious intellectualism are not a new phenomenon. Hinted in his 2011 book, Cosmopolitans and Heretics, Carool Kersten examined the life and work of Nurcholish Madjid, popularly known as Cak Nur, one of the most prominent progressive Muslim scholars ever born in this country, who died in 2005.

Together with Egyptian Hasan Hanafi and French-Algerian Mohamed Arkoun, Cak Nur embraced a cosmopolitan worldview and advocated religious tolerance and pluralism in Indonesia. Without doubt, he re-interpreted verses of the Koran and Hadith to be contextualised in the unique-cum-pluralistic cultures of this country.

Unfortunately, this act saw him defined as a heretic by other Indonesian Muslim scholars.

Related to the violent interruptions targeting Manji’s public discussion, the challenge against Islamic intellectualism seems to be getting worse.

A witch-hunt-like operation perpetuated by FPI members has sent a clear signal of a dark future for Islamic intellectual activities.

There are at least two major obstacles undermining Muslim intellectualism: The lack of political will and the inability of public officials to preserve the freedom of religion and free speech; and the silence of the majority — moderate Muslims — toward intolerant and violent actions perpetuated by Muslim thugs.

Aside from the impotency of the government to act against groups of Islamic vigilantes, which is widely highlighted by printed and digital media, the fact that the majority of Muslims were silent must be paid more attention.

Here, Manji was correct. As she persuasively delineated in her first book, the trouble with today’s Muslim community is the unwillingness of the majority, who are religiously moderate, to take action against repressive, intolerant and violent activities in the name of the holiness of their religion.

The majority of Muslims are the true owner of Islam and relatively free from any political and economic motives embracing this peaceful religion. But because adhering to a religion is always demanding unreserved obedience to religious rules and leaders, their disagreement with the unjustified actions carried out in the name of Islam could be easily muted.

In short, while we may lose hope in the current regime tackling the current intolerant and repressive actions campaigned by Muslim thugs, we have to approach the majority of moderate Muslims to stand up against them.

Only by winning the hearts and minds of the majority will we envisage religiously tolerant environment of exuberance for Islamic intellectualism.

SOURCE:The Jakarta Post

CAIRO – The guilty verdict in a child abuse scandal has brought the Pakistani community in Britain into the eye of storm, heightening racial tension in the European country, The Manchester News Evening reported Wednesday, May 9.

“These criminals have brought shame on themselves, their families and our community,” Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of Muslim campaign group the Ramadhan Foundation, said.

“We reject their actions without reservation and send our thoughts to the victims and reject any attempt by the far right to tarnish the whole Pakistani community.

“Their actions have no place in a decent society and today we can say justice has been done.”

A Liverpool court on Wednesday convicted nine men of Pakistani and Afghan descent in a child abuse scandal.

The court found that the nine men exploited girls, who were all white, in sexual activities in return for drugs and alcohol.

Shafiq opines that the scandal has exposed a problem with the Pakistani community in Britain.

“There is a significant problem for the British Pakistani community,” he said.

“There is an over representation amongst recent convictions in the crime of on-street grooming.”

He insisted that the case was about race.

“There should be no silence in addressing the issue of race as this is central to the actions of these criminals,” Shafiq said.

“They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behavior that is bringing shame on our community.

“I urge the Police and the Councils not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.”

Last year, former British Home Secretary Jack Straw accused Pakistani immigrants of seeing white girls an “easy meat” for abuses, drawing accusations of stigmatizing the whole community.

Race

Shafiq believes that the Pakistani community elders were to blame for failing to tackle problems facing the community.

“Community elders are once again burying their heads in the sand, this concerns us all and we must speak out,” he said.

“The community elders need to learn from the reaction of young people and reject any attempt to silence the reaction from our community.

“We have over the past twelve months seen tremendous progress, more Imams have spoken out in Friday sermons, workshops and activities for young people have happened in the community and there is a strong commitment to see this work through.”

But police officials ruled out that race was behind the scandal.

“There’s no evidence they were targeted because they were white,” a senior detective on the case told The Manchester News Evening.

“They were targeted because they were there.”

Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, echoes a similar view.

“I have dealt with sexual crime for many years at the highest levels. This type of crime happens in every community,” he said.

“It’s not race that defines (the perpetrators). It’s their attitude to women and young girls that defines them. It’s about men wanting to exert their power over young women.”
Britain is home to a sizable Muslim minority of nearly 2.5 million. The majority of the multi-ethnic minority has Indian, Bengali and Pakistani backgrounds.

SOURCE:onislam