Ali Eteraz at Unwilling Self-Negation has an interesting post (and be sure to read the comments), Zaid Shakir Is Not Our Mouthpiece, that was triggered by an article from the New York Times. The Times piece by Laurie Goodstein, U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground, is a bit of a puff piece apparently meant to humanize the face of Islam to its readers. However, perhaps inadvertently, Goodstein includes some rather revealing comments from one of her subjects. Zaid Shakir, nee Ricky Mitchell, is described as an African-American who has used "anti-American rhetoric" in his past but is now older, wiser, and more moderate.
Toward the end of the profile of Sheik Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, Goodstein quotes some remarkably revealing statements from Shakir [Emphasis mine-SW]:
While leading a mosque in New Haven in 1992, Mr. Shakir wrote a pamphlet that cautioned Muslims not to be co-opted by American politics. He wrote, "Islam presents an absolutist political agenda, or one which doesn't lend itself to compromise, nor to coalition building."
While he did not denounce Muslims who take part in politics, he pointed out the effectiveness of "extrasystemic political action" — like the "armed struggle" that brought about the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. ...
While studying in Syria a few years later, he visited Hama, a city that had tried to revolt against the Syrian ruler, Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Shakir said he saw mass graves and bulldozed neighborhoods, and talked with widows of those killed. He gave up on the idea of armed struggle, he said, "just seeing the reality of where revolution can end."
Asked now about his past, he said, "To be perfectly honest, I don't regret anything I've done or said."
He added, "I had to go through that stage to become the person that I am, and I'm not willing to negate my past."
He said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, "not by violent means, but by persuasion."
"Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country," he said. "I think it would help people, and if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it's helped a lot of people in my community."
Ali makes some very cogent objections to Shakir's usurpation of his voice:
This is one of the most irresponsible statements to ever come out of a Muslim leader’s mouth. So let me get this straight: First, Muslims that don’t agree with him are dishonest? Well done Zaid. Second, most of us do not want America to become a Muslim country. We like just how it is. If people convert to Islam, that’s nice. However, as far as the political make up of this country goes: we want a republic, we want it secular, and we want it free from theocentric ideologues such as yourself. As we do not want Christianists to rule us, we don’t want America to embrace some kind of hegemonic Islamic political system.
This is really bothersome because it reveals the totalitarian, triumphalist, supremacist, utopian, theocratic, and separatist impulse at the bottom of traditionalist Islam.
....
In the end, the NYT article exposed everything we need to know about Western traditionalist Islam. It opens with Yusuf asking Muslims for money and it ends with a promise to convert a whole country to Islam. These aren’t scholars; no, they are the same money-grubbing, promise-peddling, rhetoric-spewing, politically out of touch supremacist traditionalist leaders we have in the rest of the Muslim world (and that most other religions are burdened by). In the end, the voices of legitimate scholars like Khaled Abu el Fadl, Mernissi, Ghamidi, Muqtedar Khan and The Averroes Foundation get drowned out in one organic-milk induced traditionalist burp.
There are two significant issues that the Times article indirectly raises and never addresses, issues that would have provided much more compelling subject matter for these profiles of so-called, MSM anointed Moderate Muslims. It refers back to the interplay between radical, expansionist Islam and Jihadi terror with the Western Media and governmental enablers in their information war.
Shakir exposes himself as a Muslim who believes in turning America into a Muslim nation. He professes to believe in using non-violent means to bring this about, yet there is a not so subtle contradiction in his comments that the reporter fails to see. As Dinocrat pointed out in a superb post a month ago, our war is with that part of Islam which desires to impose Sharia law on the rest of us. Terror, demographics, and misdirection are merely different tactics that the proponents of Sharia use to fight their age old battle with the non-believers. According to the proponents of Jihad,if you do not ascribe to the position that Sharia law should be the law of the land wherever Muslims live (and eventually around the entire globe) you are an apostate, not a Muslim, and the penalty for apostasy is death. Sharia, like any other body of law, is ultimately based on compulsion, ie, the threat of force, and is meant to replace the secular body of law in the nations which adopt it. This makes Shakir's statements much more telling and important.
All religions have had to make their accommodations with the secular world. Judaism almost from its birth, of necessity, treated the secular and the holy as distinct realms. Jesus established the separation of church and state, often honored in the breech, but relevant to this day, with "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s." Islam has never taken such a stand; according to Islam, there is no such thing as separation of church and state, which is why so many Muslim countries are known as Islamic Republics (only time will tell if this is an oxymoron.)
This is where our governments and our media have failed us so egregiously. Goodstein had a perfect opportunity to try to pin down this "spokesman" for Islam as to his position on Sharia law. She failed to do so, preferring a rather non-informative feel-good piece about how popular her two subjects are among their throngs of supporters.
In my series on Christian Zionists and their relationship with American Jews and Israel, I pointed out that for people who have minimal first hand knowledge of the subject and rely on the MSM to inform us, we have little opportunity to recognize the distortions inherent in the limited views the MSM gives of their subjects. The fact is that Goodstein is a reporter, and almost certainly has only a superficial grasp of her subject matter. Because of this she can be easily manipulated by Shakir, who in his arrogance apparently hasn't realized there are some things he would be better off leaving unsaid because of their revealing nature.
In Shakir's attempt to disarm his critics, in which he relies on the unwitting assistance of a New York Times reporter (the story apparently was on page one) both show a certain self-destructive turn. The reporter, perhaps because she has not done her research, appears to be unfamiliar with the concept of taqiah, dissimulation against the infidel. Further, she appears to be ignorant of the implications of her own article and the quotes she includes. Shakir, in being treated as a spokesman for Moderate Islam goes far enough to reveal his agenda and raise questions in the reader which are inconvenient for him.
I can sympathize with Ali's plight. Although there are many things I find to disagree with in his posts, he clearly thinks of himself as a Moderate Muslim, and as an American; I welcome anyone who comes to America to be an America. Yet Ali's problem is that he is not the head of a Mosque or the spokesman for any accepted Muslim organization and as such has no real access to the organs of information dissemination beyond the blogosphere. The scholars of Islam he mentions are almost never quoted in the Western press. The Muslims who are turned to by the MSM and by the government to speak as agents of the Muslim community in America tend to be those whose agenda is at odds with the American ethos. The more they speak and the more their connections to unsavory Jihadists is exposed (see Daniel Pipes or LGF for their discussions of CAIR) the more the credibility of all Muslims is brought into question. It is not fair, but if the only Muslims Americans see are people like Shakir and the various terrorists who speak in the same terms, distrust of Muslims is inevitbale. (The Dubai Ports fiasco would be a case in point.) Until our governments and our MSM become much more sophisticated and nuanced in their depictions of Islam, the default image of Islam will remain that projected by our enemies, to the long term detriment of all of us.
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