First a video:
Pardon the stupid title of the video. I know some community members on these forums hate Islam/Muslims. I just wanted to make it clear that the Islamic polity is not as unified as it might appear, especially ideologically. So while one group might act with the intellectual capacity of apes, this is not universal. This video imo demonstrates that division in a modern context. The scholar speaking is literally the leading scholar of the conference he is speaking at, and was attacked and demonized by his viewers? For what? For being honest.
Wall of text:
As a Muslim, you can understand that I do not savor the idea of a future where Muslims are being deported en-masse from America as part of a religious exodus. This is my attempt to explain to you why I believe that is not necessary.
The Sunni Muslim community is basically divided into 3 portions:
1) Salafi's/Wahhabi's
A newer movement that was created by the founders of Saudi Arabia and is basically the root of all all the terrorism. They are usually an intellectually deficient bunch.
2) Normative's
These muslim's don't really have much knowledge of the religion they believe in beyond some basic facts. Here you'll find muslim feminists and other kind of poetic contradictions of human beings.
3) Sufi's
This is the group I personally belong to, and the scholar above belongs to. Countries like malaysia, indonesia, singapore were built by Sufi's. This group is spiritually-focused and throughout history sufi's have actually had a pretty healthy relationship with Jewish Kabbalists, Christian spirituals etc. Sufism was basically the state religion of the non-shia medieval Islamic empires/caliphates i.e the Ottomans, Abbasids, Seljuq's. Saladin, famous for his superior treatment of the Christian's of Jerusalem and honored in Christian literature falls into this category.
At a time when the behavior of group #1 and many other muslims' is causing people to worry about the consequences of living alongside Muslim's. I want people to understand that the real solution of the problem of terrorism and intrusive Muslims is not some sort of eradication. I believe that the solution is two steps:
1) To block off all Saudi/Salafi funding and investment into Western religious institutions. They tend to have a lot of oil money and because of that are able to spread their self-legitimizing ideology which thrives on demonizing everyone from non-muslims to other muslims who do not accept their authority. They do this by in part offering communities money to build mosques etc. but ofc not without some conditions.
2) To support Sufism and traditional Islamic scholarship, the approach of Vladmir Putin. This interpretation of Islam poses literally no threat of violence. Sufi's as a political group tend to respect other peoples choices and way's of life and do not try to intrude or impose on anyone else. * I will provide a substantiating example for this after the next paragraph
Trust me you won't find any Sufi's bombing anyone, killing anyone, it's literally pure insanity to us. Sufi's did fight in the crusades, and the Syrian and Algerian wars against the French colonialists for example, but they do not kill non-hostile civilians. The Salafi movement on the other hand, in it's most original form was literally an excuse for the Saudi's to slaughter other muslims and invade their present day territory. Non-muslims of course, they hate even more.
An example supporting point #2 is the story of Emir Abdelkader Al-Jazairi
In July 1860, conflict between the Druze and Maronites of Mount Lebanon spread to Damascus, and local Druze attacked the Christian quarter, killing over 3,000 people. Abdelkader had previously warned the French consul as well as the Council of Damascus that violence was imminent; when it finally broke out, he sheltered large numbers of Christians, including the heads of several foreign consulates as well as religious groups such as the Sisters of Mercy, in the safety of his house.[9] His eldest sons were sent into the streets to offer any Christians under threat shelter under his protection, and Abdelkader himself was said by many survivors to have played an instrumental part in saving them.
[W]e were in consternation, all of us quite convinced that our last hour had arrived [...]. In that expectation of death, in those indescribable moments of anguish, heaven, however, sent us a savior! Abd el-Kader appeared, surrounded by his Algerians, around forty of them. He was on horseback and without arms: his handsome figure calm and imposing made a strange contrast with the noise and disorder that reigned everywhere.
— Le Siècle newspaper, 2 August 1869[12]
Reports coming out of Syria as the rioting subsided stressed the prominent role of Abdelkader, and considerable international recognition followed. The French government increased his pension to 150,000 francs and bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur;[10] he also received the Grand Cross of the Redeemer from Greece, the Order of the Medjidie, First Class from Turkey, and the Order of Pius IX from the Vatican.[9] Abraham Lincoln sent him a pair of inlaid pistols (now on display in the Algiers museum) and Great Britain a gold-inlaid shotgun. In France, the episode represented the culmination of a remarkable turnaround, from being considered as an enemy of France during the first half of the 19th century, to becoming a "friend of France" after having intervened in favor of persecuted Christians.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]
In 1865 he visited Paris on the invitation of Napoléon III and was greeted with both official and popular respect. In 1871, during an insurrection in Algeria, he disowned one of his sons who was arousing the tribes around Constantine.[1]
He wrote Rappel à l′intelligent, avis à l′indifférent (Call to the Intelligent, Warning to the Indifferent).[1] Abdelkader died in Damascus on 26 May 1883 and was buried near the great Sufi Ibn Arabi in Damascus.
If you read all the way to this point, thank you for the time of day. Maybe this has changed your perspective, maybe not. I just hope we can fulfill the American vision and live in a land of peaceful co-existence, where we all increase the prosperity of one another and do not threaten each other, attack each other.
Take a gander at this blurb:
The legendary bluenose Cotton Mather had his faults, but a lack of curiosity about the world was not one of them. Mather paid scrupulous attention to the Ottoman Empire in his voracious reading, and cited the Koran often in passing. True, much of it was in his pinched voice — as far back as the 17th century, New England sailors were being kidnapped by North African pirates, a source of never ending vexation, and Mather denounced the pirates as “Mahometan Turks, and Moors and Devils.” But he admired Arab and Ottoman learning, and when Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna succeeded in inoculating patients against smallpox, he led a public campaign to do the same in Boston (a campaign for which he was much vilified by those who called inoculation the “work of the Devil,” merely because of its Islamic origin). It was one of his finer moments.
This theory was eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters, Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”
As the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.” George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist, to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.
Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only two years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk radio extremists. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or “people of the book,” similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions.
Thanks for reading. Maybe twenty years from now the visions of Franklin and Jefferson will be achieved. Maybe not. Regardless, I intend to convince as many people as I can to resolve the challenges of today with reason and mutual respect, not with hatred and divisiveness.
Pardon the stupid title of the video. I know some community members on these forums hate Islam/Muslims. I just wanted to make it clear that the Islamic polity is not as unified as it might appear, especially ideologically. So while one group might act with the intellectual capacity of apes, this is not universal. This video imo demonstrates that division in a modern context. The scholar speaking is literally the leading scholar of the conference he is speaking at, and was attacked and demonized by his viewers? For what? For being honest.
Wall of text:
As a Muslim, you can understand that I do not savor the idea of a future where Muslims are being deported en-masse from America as part of a religious exodus. This is my attempt to explain to you why I believe that is not necessary.
The Sunni Muslim community is basically divided into 3 portions:
1) Salafi's/Wahhabi's
A newer movement that was created by the founders of Saudi Arabia and is basically the root of all all the terrorism. They are usually an intellectually deficient bunch.
2) Normative's
These muslim's don't really have much knowledge of the religion they believe in beyond some basic facts. Here you'll find muslim feminists and other kind of poetic contradictions of human beings.
3) Sufi's
This is the group I personally belong to, and the scholar above belongs to. Countries like malaysia, indonesia, singapore were built by Sufi's. This group is spiritually-focused and throughout history sufi's have actually had a pretty healthy relationship with Jewish Kabbalists, Christian spirituals etc. Sufism was basically the state religion of the non-shia medieval Islamic empires/caliphates i.e the Ottomans, Abbasids, Seljuq's. Saladin, famous for his superior treatment of the Christian's of Jerusalem and honored in Christian literature falls into this category.
At a time when the behavior of group #1 and many other muslims' is causing people to worry about the consequences of living alongside Muslim's. I want people to understand that the real solution of the problem of terrorism and intrusive Muslims is not some sort of eradication. I believe that the solution is two steps:
1) To block off all Saudi/Salafi funding and investment into Western religious institutions. They tend to have a lot of oil money and because of that are able to spread their self-legitimizing ideology which thrives on demonizing everyone from non-muslims to other muslims who do not accept their authority. They do this by in part offering communities money to build mosques etc. but ofc not without some conditions.
2) To support Sufism and traditional Islamic scholarship, the approach of Vladmir Putin. This interpretation of Islam poses literally no threat of violence. Sufi's as a political group tend to respect other peoples choices and way's of life and do not try to intrude or impose on anyone else. * I will provide a substantiating example for this after the next paragraph
Trust me you won't find any Sufi's bombing anyone, killing anyone, it's literally pure insanity to us. Sufi's did fight in the crusades, and the Syrian and Algerian wars against the French colonialists for example, but they do not kill non-hostile civilians. The Salafi movement on the other hand, in it's most original form was literally an excuse for the Saudi's to slaughter other muslims and invade their present day territory. Non-muslims of course, they hate even more.
An example supporting point #2 is the story of Emir Abdelkader Al-Jazairi
In July 1860, conflict between the Druze and Maronites of Mount Lebanon spread to Damascus, and local Druze attacked the Christian quarter, killing over 3,000 people. Abdelkader had previously warned the French consul as well as the Council of Damascus that violence was imminent; when it finally broke out, he sheltered large numbers of Christians, including the heads of several foreign consulates as well as religious groups such as the Sisters of Mercy, in the safety of his house.[9] His eldest sons were sent into the streets to offer any Christians under threat shelter under his protection, and Abdelkader himself was said by many survivors to have played an instrumental part in saving them.
[W]e were in consternation, all of us quite convinced that our last hour had arrived [...]. In that expectation of death, in those indescribable moments of anguish, heaven, however, sent us a savior! Abd el-Kader appeared, surrounded by his Algerians, around forty of them. He was on horseback and without arms: his handsome figure calm and imposing made a strange contrast with the noise and disorder that reigned everywhere.
— Le Siècle newspaper, 2 August 1869[12]
Reports coming out of Syria as the rioting subsided stressed the prominent role of Abdelkader, and considerable international recognition followed. The French government increased his pension to 150,000 francs and bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur;[10] he also received the Grand Cross of the Redeemer from Greece, the Order of the Medjidie, First Class from Turkey, and the Order of Pius IX from the Vatican.[9] Abraham Lincoln sent him a pair of inlaid pistols (now on display in the Algiers museum) and Great Britain a gold-inlaid shotgun. In France, the episode represented the culmination of a remarkable turnaround, from being considered as an enemy of France during the first half of the 19th century, to becoming a "friend of France" after having intervened in favor of persecuted Christians.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]
In 1865 he visited Paris on the invitation of Napoléon III and was greeted with both official and popular respect. In 1871, during an insurrection in Algeria, he disowned one of his sons who was arousing the tribes around Constantine.[1]
He wrote Rappel à l′intelligent, avis à l′indifférent (Call to the Intelligent, Warning to the Indifferent).[1] Abdelkader died in Damascus on 26 May 1883 and was buried near the great Sufi Ibn Arabi in Damascus.
If you read all the way to this point, thank you for the time of day. Maybe this has changed your perspective, maybe not. I just hope we can fulfill the American vision and live in a land of peaceful co-existence, where we all increase the prosperity of one another and do not threaten each other, attack each other.
Take a gander at this blurb:
The legendary bluenose Cotton Mather had his faults, but a lack of curiosity about the world was not one of them. Mather paid scrupulous attention to the Ottoman Empire in his voracious reading, and cited the Koran often in passing. True, much of it was in his pinched voice — as far back as the 17th century, New England sailors were being kidnapped by North African pirates, a source of never ending vexation, and Mather denounced the pirates as “Mahometan Turks, and Moors and Devils.” But he admired Arab and Ottoman learning, and when Turks in Constantinople and Smyrna succeeded in inoculating patients against smallpox, he led a public campaign to do the same in Boston (a campaign for which he was much vilified by those who called inoculation the “work of the Devil,” merely because of its Islamic origin). It was one of his finer moments.
This theory was eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters, Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”
As the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.” George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist, to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.
Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran, a 1764 English edition that he bought while studying law as a young man in Williamsburg, Va. Only two years ago, that Koran became the center of a controversy, when the first Muslim ever elected to Congress, Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked if he could place his hand on it while taking his oath of office — a request that elicited tremendous screeches from the talk radio extremists. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”
Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or “people of the book,” similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions.
Thanks for reading. Maybe twenty years from now the visions of Franklin and Jefferson will be achieved. Maybe not. Regardless, I intend to convince as many people as I can to resolve the challenges of today with reason and mutual respect, not with hatred and divisiveness.
