Ayaan to Liberals: Get Your Priorities Straight

[…]

Some say that critics of Islam don’t make enough of a distinction between extreme forms of Islam and more moderate forms that exist in places like Turkey, where we don’t find these rampant abuses, or in Bosnia where there’s a moderate Muslim community. Do you think there should be more of a distinction made between these different forms?

I say that there is one Islam at this moment that is unreformed and that is centered around [the] Quran, the prophet Mohammed, and Islamic jurisprudence. So, if you take Islam as a set of beliefs, a set of ideas, there is one Islam. Of course there is Sunni Islam and there is Shia and all these other distinctions. But I do choose to make a distinction between different types of Muslims [and] the way they approach that doctrine. There’s the Medina Muslims, the ones who take the Quran and Mohammed’s example literally and also put the emphasis on his time in Medina, which is different from his time in Mecca. And then I find the Mecca Muslims, who are struggling to live in the modern world and somehow reconcile their beliefs with modernity. And the most important group, the dissidents of Islam, who are trying to reform the religion from within. I’m calling, instead of us siding with the people who just want to shut debate down, like the honor brigade, let us side with the reformers.

Is your new book a departure from your previous ones, in terms of your view of Islam? You mention that you are “re-engaging” with Islam.

Yes, it is, because when I wrote my last book, [Nomad], in 2010, the Arab Spring had not occurred yet. I hadn’t witnessed, as we all have, these large numbers of Arabic Muslims who are demonstrating against sharia law. First of all, they demonstrated against the despot of the day; some of these countries managed to topple them, other fell into anarchy. But what’s interesting about countries like Tunisia, Egypt, even Saudi Arabia—and most profoundly, Iran—we have large numbers of [people who say] that they want to be Muslims, they want Islam, but they don’t want to live under sharia law. In 2010, I hadn’t seen that, or I hadn’t seen enough of it.

More here.

NOTE: The Medina Muslims were of course different from the Meccan Muslims upon which the Islamic calander (the latter) is based, reflecting Mohamed’s hijra into political Islam. Where her thinking runs afoul, is her insistence that Muslims can, by sheer numbers, change Islam into something that it can never be. Even those numbers of ‘peace loving’ Muslims that she insists are increasing, and giving her cause for hope, are illusionary. Poll after poll taken shows strong support for sharia.

The issue of abrogation is the serious fly in the soup that Ayaan Hirsi Ali refuses to address, time and time again, and I know the reason why, it removes the rug from beneath her feet.

”The relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims established by sura 5, which is the last sura to talk about those relations, chronologically in the Koran. Then the last sura to talk about jihad is sura 9, it says ”fight them till they testify that there is no God but God and that Mohamed is the messenger of God”, and someone asked Mohamed what that meant, and he said in hadiths ratified by both Bukari and Muslim (widely respected authoritative scholars on hadiths); ”It means that I’ve been commanded to fight them till they say that there is no God but God and Mohamed is the messenger of God”. Now that is a fact, and anyone who disagrees is wrong, and they’ll never be right, and that’s abrogation.” Stephen Coughin, at CSP’s Deafeating Jihad conference in D.C. Feb 11 2015