Riwayat Attubani

Riwayat Attubani- How can anyone justify Islam's treatment of women, when it imprisons Afghans under blue shuttlecock burqas and makes Pakistani girls marry strangers against their will? How can you respect a religion that forces women into polygamous marriages, mutilates their genitals, forbids them to drive cars and subjects them to the humiliation of "instant" divorce? In fact, none of these practices are Islamic at all. Anyone wishing to understand Islam must first separate the religion from the cultural norms and style of a society. Female genital mutilation is still practised in certain pockets of Africa and Egypt, but viewed as an inconceivable horror by the vast majority of Muslims. Forced marriages may still take place in certain Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, but would be anathema to Muslim women from other backgrounds. Indeed, Islam insists on the free consent of both bride and groom, so such marriages could even be deemed illegal under religiou...

Riwayat Attubani-"What was once an occasional event -- silencing scholars -- increasingly has become a way of life in most Muslim countries. From South Asia to North Africa, an entire generation of Muslim intellectuals is at this moment under threat: Many have already been killed, silenced, or forced into exile." By Akbar Ahmed and Lawrence Rosen As America and its allies have set about building coalitions that include many of the Islamic nations, it is easy to lose sight of the issue of intellectual freedom within the Muslim world. While the safety of Western countries may depend on alliances with other regimes, those alliances should not come at the price of abandoning scholars and intellectuals in the Middle East, whose ability to speak out is no less under attack, often by these same governments. Our concern is that scholars in Muslim countries will be overlooked in the rush to forge expedient alliances. The image shown to the world on the cover of the June 17, 2001, ...

Akbar S. Ahmed, celebrates the Jewish contribution to humanity and the shared core belief in the one omnipotent, universal God. American incursions into Iraq mean that once again Muslims and Jews, and not only in the Middle East, will be on opposite sides. Yet when I, as a Muslim, contemplate the Jewish contribution to humanity in history, I feel awe and pride. Awe because of the scale of the contribution -some of the most influential shapers of our world have Jewish associations, like Marx, Freud and Einstein. And pride because I am aware that there are traditional and mythological connections between Islam and Judaism. Both go back to the core of belief - to the idea of one omnipotent, universal God. The remarkable harmony and symbiosis recorded in history is often overlooked because of the current confrontation in the Middle East, and it is well for scholars and leaders to look back to the synthesis there once was in Spain. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes the "almost bo...