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The future of progressive Islam: My Newsweek.com exclusive

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, Announcements on May 01, 2009

Faces of progressive Islam in Indonesia (April 2008)

With the media focused on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, it’s easy to assume that progressive Islam has no hope in hell.

But if you read this blog regularly, you know that I highlight reformist Muslim voices at every turn. As I said to my Facebook fans a few days ago, “Let’s bring Islam’s reformists out of the shadows and give the world much-needed hope.”

Now, Newsweek.com is featuring my latest essay about the future of progressive Islam. Here’s the opener:

At a recent event in India, I asked Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, whether he would support his country’s tireless human rights activists. He invited me to pose a different question. I didn’t.

“Sit down!” the retired army general then ordered.

Things probably won’t get that tense when Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari, visits Barack Obama next week. But maybe they should, given the Taliban’s growing reach and Zardari’s plunging cred. The two presidents will be joined by a third, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a religious “moderate” who routinely barters away the rights of women and minorities to warlords and mullahs.

As a reform-minded Muslim, I admit that these guys make the notion of diversity in my faith look laughable. Their track records underscore why, to fathom the future of progressive Islam, we have to venture beyond the geo-political hotspots…”

Read my entire Newsweek.com essay.

And remember to comment! My favorite reactions so far:

“I take offense at the recent push to recognize this heinous belief. You can stick it up where the sun dont shine! This insidious machinations of corrupted minds and manipulative skulduggery is reprehensible. Go away!”

Another reader echoes this statement by commenting, “Ban Islam worldwide and any of the other cults posing as religion that oppress their followers or use force in any way to promote their garbage!” To which the mischievously named Osama Bin Login replies, “Does anyone else see the irony in that statement?”

Personally, I don’t see the irony in insisting that violent cults be expunged — by force if diplomacy fails.  How else would Nazism have been defeated? We should never tolerate persistent intolerance for the sake of “inclusion,” as that only legitimizes the exclusion practiced by those whom we’re bending over backwards to accommodate. Osama bin Login loses me on that score.

But unlike the reader who wants to “ban Islam,” I believe that a tolerant, humane and rational version of Islam is possible.  Indeed, my Newsweek.com feature gives a real-world example, which apparently escaped the reader’s radar. “Ban Islam” proves the old adage that people hear what they want to hear.

We all come to the table with prejudices — some, to be sure, more dangerous than others.