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JihadSpinAdmin
USA
144 Posts |
 Posted - 06/09/2008 : 07:15:42
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By Silvia Dropulich
The Islamic world is a diverse and changing world and the beauty of the Qur’an is in its emphasis on justice, humanism, mercy, compassion and charity, according to Professor Riaz Hassan. But any observer of the Musilm world would not find it too difficult to discover there were also ugly practices in the Islamic world, he said.
Professor Riaz, an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at Flinders University, was speaking at the University of Melbourne where he gave a public lecture focusing on his new book Inside Muslim Minds.
“In my book I start by giving examples of these ugly practices: from the flogging of petty gamblers in Ache, to the harassment and imprisonment of women in Pakistani jails,” Professor Hassan said.
“I asked myself, if I am right about the religion that I have experienced – Muslims basically are middle of the road sort of people – how is it that they also tolerate the practices that I’ve just described? That was the starting point of my study.”
Published by Melbourne University Publishing, Inside Muslim Minds has been described as a groundbreaking comparative study of contemporary Islamic consciousness. It argues for a new intellectual commitment that honours Islamic heritage yet simultaneously confronts Islamic reassertion and the sense of powerlessness felt by Muslims as they strive to reaffirm their faith in the 21st century.
Professor Hassan, who grew up as a Muslim, used data gathered from more than 6000 Muslim respondents from seven countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Kazakhstan.
He examined attitudes to issues such as religious commitment; the status of women; the concept of Jihad and its alleged links to terrorism; Islamic philanthropy; attitudes towards blasphemy; and Muslim perceptions of the ‘other’.
“Lumping the Islamic world together really doesn’t take you very far because it is a very diverse world, moving in different directions,” Professor Hassan said.
“If you really want to make sense and understand it, you have to really try to take different snapshots.”
Professor Hassan believes readers are likely to find the first chapter of his book annoying, adding that it was depressing for him when he was writing it. He describes, for example, a case that occurred in Saudi Arabia. A girls’ school caught fire and the students were running out of the building but religious police would not let them out because they were not properly attired.
“Fourteen students were burned to death or asphyxiated by smoke,” Professor Hassan said.
“Witnesses told Saudi newspapers that the mutawaun demanded that the girls return to the building to retrieve their veils before being allowed to leave the school and that at least three girls were beaten with sticks and kicked when they attempted to argue.
“The few girls who obeyed and went back into the burning building were later found dead.”
According to Professor Hassan the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the Saudi government department responsible for administering the mutawaun, denied that the doors were locked, or that the girls or civil defence workers were beaten, as alleged. No investigation or prosecution took place, and the incident was now all but forgotten in Saudi Arabia.
Professor Hassan argues that there is a particular mindset, and he calls this Salafibism, which seemed to be pervasive in the Muslim world. Salafibism is a fusion of two strands of Islamic consciousness, Salafism and Wahhabism. The characteristic feature of Salafibism was a belief in the self-sufficiency of the Islamic text… “a literalist interpretation of Islamic texts, a supremacist and arrogant mindset, misogynist attitudes and hostility towards the indeterminacy of the modern world”.
“Theological constructs and social responses that tolerate the commission of acts of cruelty are the product of a long process of indoctrination and acculturation,” Professor Hassan writes.
“Muslims ought to be seriously concerned when Islam is repeatedly and consistently invoked to justify immoral behaviour.
“Each abusive act committed in the name of Islam becomes an historical precedent, and each precedent can carry normative weight and therefore influence the meanings of Islam and Islamic values in the future.”
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