Can anyone name a moderate Muslim cleric?

Answer 1

By JOHN F. BURNS

January 27, 2002

AZHAKHEL BALA, Pakistan, Jan. 20 — Little in the manner of Ijaz Khan Hussein betrays the miseries he saw as a volunteer in the war in Afghanistan.

Mr. Khan, a college-trained pharmacist, joined the jihad, or holy war, like thousands of other Pakistanis who crossed over into Afghanistan.

He worked as a medical orderly near Kabul, shuttling to the front lines, picking up bodies and parts of bodies. Of 43 men who traveled with him to Afghanistan by truck in October, he says, 41 were killed.

Now with the Taliban and Al Qaeda routed, have Mr. Khan and other militants finished with holy war?

Mr. Khan, at least, said he had not.

"We went to the jihad filled with joy, and I would go again tomorrow," he said. "If Allah had chosen me to die, I would have been in paradise, eating honey and watermelons and grapes, and resting with beautiful virgins, just as it is promised in the Koran. Instead, my fate was to remain amid the unhappiness here on earth."

Jihad literally means striving. The Prophet Muhammad gave Muslims the task of striving in the path of God. Whether that striving is armed or a personal duty of conscience is a question causing consternation in the world's 1.2 billion Muslims, and that question goes to the heart of President Bush's war on terrorism.

In the Muslim world, it seems that Osama bin Laden is now a fractured idol, and many Muslim scholars criticize him. Yet he also remains appealing to others, almost as a political Robin Hood.

"Osama bin Laden is not a theologian, or a jihadist in the traditional sense of the term; he's a political activist," said one critic, Olivier Roy, a French scholar who has written several books about Afghanistan. "He has Islamized the traditional discourse of Western anti-imperialism. So a lot of Muslims support him, not because they see him as a true warrior for Islam, but because they hate America, and he's the only man in the Islamic world that they see fighting the Americans. He's like Carlos the Jackal converted to Islam."

In mosques and Islamic seminaries from Morocco to Indonesia, moderate Muslims have been scouring the Koran to demonstrate that a true vision of jihad can never be squared with Sept. 11, even while expressing how aggrieved Muslims may be with America over issues Mr. bin Laden has identified in his videotapes, like Israel's treatment of Palestinians, the presence of American troops in the Arabian peninsula and the United States' role in maintaining sanctions against Iraq.

"Don't make the mistake of thinking that Osama bin Laden is the true face of a billion Muslims, or the true voice of the Koran," said Dr. Safir Akhtar, a research scholar at the Islamic University in Islamabad, a Saudi-financed institution that has long been a magnet for young militants from around the Islamic world.

"He may have a special appeal through his religiosity," Dr. Akhtar said, "and his spartan way of life, and he has certainly drawn deeply from Muslims' deep sense of frustration, but people think of him more as an adventurer than as an Islamic leader, and they know from their own studies that his sense of jihad is deeply flawed."

Conversations with ordinary Muslims in Pakistan tend quickly to turn to their disillusionment with the inglorious figure Mr. bin Laden has cut since Sept. 11 — as he counseled future jihadis that "this world is an illusion," valueless beside paradise, and posed for the videotapes with a Kalashnikov and a camouflage jacket, while avoiding the hazards of combat himself. Moreover, many of Islam's most militant theologians now rebuke Mr. bin Laden, who suggested in the videotapes that he cast himself in the mold of Saladin, who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the 12th century.

From Cairo, Beirut and Tehran, and a dozen other centers of fervent Islamic belief, pioneers of Mr. bin Laden's kind of jihad — violent, anti- Western, above all anti-American and anti-Israeli — have called him a coward and an enemy of Islam.

No example is starker than that of Sheik Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Party of God, for 25 years a scourge of Israel and the United States with its suicide bombings and other terror attacks in Lebanon and Israel. After a 1983 truck bombing of a United States Marine barracks near the Beirut airport killed 241 servicemen, American officials accused Sheik Fadlallah of having ordered the attack, an allegation he returned when he blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for a 1985 car bombing outside his Beirut home that killed 75 people.

But Sheik Fadlallah, now 66, has been relentless in his condemnation of the attacks in America.

He preaches that they were "not compatible with Shariah law," the Koranic legal code, nor with the Islamic concept of jihad, and that the perpetrators were not martyrs as Mr. bin Laden has claimed, but "merely suicides," because they killed innocent civilians, and in a distant land, America. In an interview with a Beirut newspaper, Al Safir, Sheik Fadlallah again accused Mr. bin Laden of having ignored Koranic texts.

"There is no concept of jihad as aggressive combat," he said, quoting verses of the Koran that Islamic theologians have argued over for centuries. In misreading these texts, he said, Mr. bin Laden had relied on "personal psychological needs," including a "tribal urge for revenge."

An Egyptian-born theologian, Sheik Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, with a history of anti-American militancy even longer than Sheik Fadlallah's, expresses a similar view. From his base in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, the 75-year-old sheik has issued Islamic fatwas, or decrees, on issues like the need for Muslims to boycott McDonald's restaurants, and on husbands' right to beat their wives as long as they do not draw blood.

But on the Sept. 11 attacks, he has used language similar to that of Mr. Bush and other American politicians.

"Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin," said. "Even in times of war, Muslims are not allowed to kill anybody save the one who is engaged in face-to-face confrontation with them.

"Killing hundreds of helpless civilians," he added, "is a heinous crime in Islam."

To many Western scholars, Mr. bin Laden stands out not for the liturgical context, but for drawing on the wellspring of anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world.

Another French scholar, Gilles Kepel, said Mr. bin Laden drew his views from a deadly mixture of the fundamentalist, aggressive form of Islam known as Salafism that he knew as a student in Saudi Arabia and the heady, but misleading, experience he had when he arrived in Afghanistan in the 1980's to join the last stages of the jihad against Soviet occupation troops.

"By 1989, the jihadists thought that they had destroyed the Soviet Union, and that militant Islam was a force that could prevail against any enemy, forgetting that what really drove the Russians out of Afghanistan was the Stinger antiaircraft missiles given to them by the United States, which neutralized Soviet air power," Dr. Kepel said. "This led them to believe that they could triumph everywhere."

That has not been the case. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan for just five years. Islamic militancy has been violently suppressed in Egypt and Algeria, has crested as an influence in Sudan, and has achieved little in Chechnya and Kashmir.

In Pakistan, clerics who saw the country as following in the Taliban's rise have instead witnessed the nation's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, starting a broad-based crackdown on Islamic militancy.

Yet there are legions of young men who seethe with resentment at America and its power, and long after Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda have faded into history, they seem likely to form a ready pool of recruits for messianic leaders.

In Pakistan, that is evident in any one of the hundreds of Islamic schools and seminaries that flourished around Peshawar, the frontier city, in the wake of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Although they are under notice now from General Musharraf that they will no longer be allowed to operate as thinly disguised recruiting camps for holy war, their courtyards still teem with angry young men who say they will one day find a way to strike back at America for all it has done in Afghanistan, and for America's "crimes" against Muslims.

At one such institution, the Markaz-e-Islami seminary near Peshawar, a visitor stopped recently to read a painted signboard inscribed with 140 names of Pakistanis who have died as "holy warriors" in Afghanistan and Kashmir since 1993.

A bearded young man named Nurullah, introducing himself as a student, pointed to a fresh board nearby that has been prepared for the names of the latest martyrs, men who died fighting with the Taliban after Sept. 11, and said, "Jihad will continue until doomsday, or until America is defeated, either way.



© Copyright of Mr. James Reston, Jr.
Used by permission of the author.
Seeking Meaning From a Grand Imam
A Top Sunni Cleric on the Use, and Misuse, of Islam
By James Reston Jr.
Sunday, March 31, 2002; Page B04
CAIRO
Nearly two weeks ago, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the grand imam of Egypt's al-Azhar
mosque and the most widely respected and influential moral voice for Sunni Islam,
sought to clarify for me the Islamic concepts of jihad, paradise and martyrdom. I had
been struck by the widespread view in the United States that Islam seems to possess no
ethical norms for armed struggle, so, before leaving for a 14-day visit to the Middle East,
I asked Nabil Fahmy, the Egyptian ambassador in Washington,whether he could arrange
an audience with the grand sheik. I wanted to clear up my own confusion over who -- if
anyone -- speaks for Islam on the concepts that, in the aftermath of the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the suicide bombings by Palestinians and the
murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, have driven so many Americans to view Islam as a
violent religion.
Tantawi, it turns out, was the right person from whom to seek guidance. While the moral
teachings of Islam rest in its law, known as sharia, there is no doctrine or orthodoxy for
Islam, nor any human authority or hierarchy to interrupt the direct relationship between
the believer and Allah. However, Sunni Muslims from Malaysia to the Middle East to
Middle America, representing more than 80 percent of Islamic believers worldwide, look
to al-Azhar and its Academy of Islamic Research (of which Tantawi is chairman) for
learned interpretation and moral counsel.
Can it be, I wondered, that any Muslim, with a few followers, can walk into the street and
proclaim a legitimate and authentic jihad against the West or Israel? Is it possible that any
group of a few thousand fanatics can attack three huge American buildings, kill 3,000
unsuspecting innocents and validly say that the act is justified by the Koran?
In his vast office, decorated with lovely wood paneling carved with geometric Arabic
designs and appointed with huge photographs of Islam's three holiest mosques, at Mecca,
Medina and Jerusalem, the 73-year-old Tantawi spoke forcefully about the
misconceptions in the West and, equally forcefully, of the perversions of Islam in the
East that have led to the violence. A small man, with puffy eyes, deliberate speech and a
gentle demeanor, he sat on his couch amid advisers and lesser imams, dressed in a simple
red and white cap and a brown, floor-length caftan.
The concept of jihad, Tantawi affirmed through an interpreter, is purely defensive and
cannot be aggressive. It can only legitimately be proclaimed by a head of state or leader
Page 2
of all Arab peoples when Arab lands are invaded and occupied (in the manner 12th-
century Islamic leader Saladin employed against the Crusader force of Richard I of
England), or when great numbers of Arab peoples are displaced and exiled, or when the
tenets of Islam are directly attacked or abused. Tantawi's explanation fit with the words I
had read in the Koran and quoted back to him: "Fight in Allah's cause against those who
wage war against you, but do not commit aggression, for verily Allah does not love
aggressors."
Tantawi spoke out against the attacks in New York and Washington the day after they
happened, saying that "killing civilians is a horrific, hideous act that no religion can
condone." Now, the grand imam was eager for me to have his fuller, written statement on
terrorism, which he had issued seven weeks after the attacks. This condemnation was
largely overlooked in the American media -- it received only a brief mention in The Post,
for example. It did not register with the American people, any more than did the
condemnations of the chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council in Saudi Arabia; or of
the Organization of the Islamic Conference (representing Muslims in 56 countries); or of
the chairman of the Sunna and Sira Council in Qatar; or of the grand mufti of Saudi
Arabia, also chairman of the senior ulema (the learned), who has, controversially,
questioned suicide missions as a legitimate tool of the Arab struggle.
The imam's statement, which I took away to study later, distinguishes between jihad and
the Koranic concept of irhab. In contrast to the defensive and obligatory nature of jihad,
irhab is terrorism: unjust, aggressive violence against innocent and defenseless civilians
that is expressly forbidden by Islamic law and Islamic principles. These rules forbid
Muslims to kill innocent people -- and in particular, religious clerics of all faiths. They
forbid killing the retreating enemy and those who surrender; they forbid harming
captives; and they expressly forbid the destruction of buildings and civil centers.
All of this made clear to me how the continuing misuse of the word jihad, in the
American media and elsewhere, perpetuates the myth that we have entered a "clash of
civilizations" (to borrow Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's term). This misuse,
repeated almost daily, is a gift to bin Laden, for such a formulation of East against West,
Islam against Christianity, America against the Arab world, is what he wished to foment.
Bin Laden may call his campaign jihad, but it is more precise to call it a crusade -- or
even irhab.
Everywhere I traveled -- in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Egypt -
- bin Laden and his group were freely and frequently labeled as criminals. The al Qaeda
leader, I heard time and again, cares nothing for the Palestinian cause, but only about
himself and his place in history -- he's a classic megalomaniac.
Nor did bin Laden's perversion of Islamic principles find credence with the many people
I spoke to. Tantawi scoffed when I read him the 1998 call to arms that bin Laden called
his fatwa: "We . . . with God's help . . . call on every Muslim who believes in God and
wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill Americans and plunder their
money."
Page 3
"Osama bin Laden is no specialist in religious affairs," the grand imam quipped, to the
delight of the imams seated to his left. And then he added: "Islamic law banishes anyone
who issues an untrue fatwa." About the references in the hijackers' documents that they
were martyrs and would achieve paradise, Tantawi was equally contemptuous. "They are
not martyrs but aggressors," he said. "They will not achieve paradise, but will receive
severe punishment for their aggression." In Islam, he noted, there is an exact equivalent
of Moses's commandant against killing. "Whoever shall kill a man or a believer without
right," said the grand imam, "the punishment is hell forever. Allah will be angry with him
and give him a great punishment." Especially ugly, Tantawi said, is the criminal who
murders by surprise, "from the back," because "it is against morality and good honor."
There are of course two sides to the current confusion over religious beliefs between the
West and Islam. On the one hand is the worry, widely acknowledged in the Persian Gulf
region, that the Islamic world has not done a good job in separating the beliefs of the vast
majority of the Arabs from the perversions of bin Ladenism. The most learned and
prestigious imams of Sunni Islam are intently aware that a wrong understanding of the
faith has taken hold in dangerous ways. When the prophet's name is appropriated by a so-
called Army of Mohammed that murders an innocent journalist, or the sacred al Aqsa
mosque in Jerusalem becomes the symbol for which teenagers kill themselves and
murder innocent people, then the faith has strayedoff course. A few weeks from now, a
conference will be held at al-Azhar to reemphasize the essential core of the faith in the
face of such "intrusive ideas."
But the other side of the coin is equally worrisome. In its fear and flag-waving and
victimhood, the American people are not listening to such distinctions. Many Americans
have projected onto all Arabs and all Muslims the view of bin Laden's aggressors. Unless
this distinction, clear-cut in the Arab world, is more widely understood in the United
States, we risk further violence based on misunderstanding.James Reston Jr. is the author
of "Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade"
(Doubleday).



Prominent Muslim Cleric Denounces bin Laden

NewsMax.com Wires
Thursday, Oct. 18, 2001

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A prominent Muslim cleric today denounced terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and urged Afghanistan's Taliban rulers not to risk thousands of lives for him.

"Bin Laden is not a prophet that we should put thousands of lives at risk for," said Tahirul Qadri, who heads the Pakistani Awami Tehrik Party.

Qadri, who has thousands of followers in Pakistan and abroad, also criticized the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden and urged the Muslims to "see the difference between jihad and acts of terrorism."

He is the first prominent Muslim scholar to condemn bin Laden and the Taliban so strongly in public. His condemnation could help the Pakistani government defuse tensions in Pakistan where a small but vocal religious group has launched a nationwide campaign against its decision to back U.S.-led military strikes into Afghanistan.

"Bombing embassies or destroying non-military installations like the World Trade Center is no jihad," Qadri said, and "those who launched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks not only killed thousands of innocent people in the United States but also put the lives of millions of Muslims across the world at risk."

"Now the Americans are killing Afghans ... they may go for other targets too. Who knows how many innocent Muslims will be killed because of those terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center?"

While urging the United States to stop its airstrikes in Afghanistan, Qadri held the Taliban rulers responsible "for the death of hundreds of innocent Afghans."

The Taliban, he said, should have handed over bin Laden and other terrorists to the United Nations or any other neutral international organization before the air strikes began. "They can still do it and save their country from further destruction," he said.

Qadri, whose Pakistan Awami Tehrik emerged as a popular religious party in local elections earlier this year, acknowledged that the United States had provided credible evidence about bin Laden's involvement in acts of terrorism.

"In the light of this evidence, the Taliban had no justification for continuing to protect bin Laden. Why protect him? Is he a saint or a prophet? He is a man who himself has admitted arranging car-bomb attacks on U.S. embassies. He is no saint."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.



Qaradawi Rejects Al-Qaeda’s Killing of Innocents
Prominent Muslim scholar Dr. Youssef Al-Qaradawi has condemned Al-Qaeda for their fuel tanker suicide bombing of a centuries-old Jewish synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba in April 2002.

On June 23 in a statement broadcast on the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television channel., Sulaiman Abu Gaith, a spokesman for the Al-Qaeda network, claimed responsibility for the explosion that killed 14 German tourists. Five local Jews also perished.

Dr. Al Qaradawi said that in Islam it is not permissible to attack places of worship such as churches and synagogues or attack men of religion, even in a state of war.

“Civilians, such as the German tourists, should not be killed, or kept as hostages. Jews, not in conflict with Muslims, must not be killed either. Anyone who commits these crimes is punishable by Islamic Sharia and have committed the sin of killing a soul which God has prohibited to kill and of spreading corruption on earth,” said Dr. Al Qaradawi.

When asked whether the killing of Jewish women, children and men is permissible, Islamic scholar Muhammad Al-Hanuti said that no one may be persecuted or tortured because of their religion.

“The only one who could be killed is the murderer or the one who commits a crime punishable by the law. In war, when people are fighting for a certain cause, Muslims are not allowed to kill the elderly, women or children. The only legitimate target is the one who is involved in combat against Muslims,” he said.

Dr. Al-Qaradawi said that the conflict with the Jews is over land and not about their Judaism, because they are people of the Book (i.e. they believe in a revealed religion).

“We are allowed to eat their food and marry their women. Accordingly, social intercourse, including inter-marriage, is permitted with the People of the Book. The Jews lived under Muslims’ protection for many centuries.

Answer 2

Association of Muslim Clerics speaks for moderate Sunnis

Answer 3

The moderate usually do not make the news. Also some of those who on public TV were condemning terrorism were later caught on secret video tape praising what they called the Magnificent 19 when referring to the hijackers.

Most Muslim Scholars see the world divided into two "houses"—the House of Peace (Dar Al-Salaam) and the House of War (Dar Al-Harb). The general idea is that Muslims belong to the House of Peace, while those who have not yet submitted to Islam belong to the House of War until they are "utterly subdued." However, even this distinction is often blurred since militant Muslims (who take the above verses at face value) also include moderate Muslims in the House of War.
From:http://www.answering-islam.org/Authors/Sene/peacepromoting.html

Answer 4

If you are thirsty and ask for a spring of water, they will lead you to the desert.

If you ask about light, they will point out towards darkness.

If you look for the truth, they will talk about the myths.

If you want to know facts, they will produce fiction.




So what do you do ???


There are always moderates and hardlinesr in every religion.But amazingly all the answeres are behaving like exteremists and blaming the muslims for extremism.

How sad ?


Since I am an Indian I will tell you one name which I respect the most. Mualana Wahiduddin.

If you want to ask some thing about Islam you can also contact Dr. Zakir Naik.

Moreover YA is also a good platform to ask any thing.

Answer 5

Secularism consistent with the dictionary is: 'the notion that faith and devout our bodies shouldn't have any facet in political or civic affairs or in strolling public associations, exceptionally faculties'. In that case the communal social gathering (now in competition as continually and can ever be) and it is allies can not be mentioned to be secular in any respect. Everything they are saying or do is professional-Hindu and anti-different religions. They are seeking to comprise faith into politics, social lifestyles, schooling, progress, and what now not. It is the coverage of the federal government of India to uplift the oppressed individuals. As of now, aside from scale down caste Hindus and south Indians, Muslims and Christians or even Sikhs are oppressed via the north Indian gang. So the federal government will do the whole thing viable for the upliftment. Yes, the underneath privileged have the primary proper to the country's assets and the PM is one hundred% proper. The frustration of biting dirt is known. Mosques, chruches and gurudwaras are minority areas of worship. Minorities have got to be included and supported as their contribution to the country's development is comparitively a lot more. They don't seem to be simply consuming away the country's wealth and organiziing riots. Sadhvi has been detained relating to the Malegaon blasts prepared via Hindu terrorists. If convicted she must take delivery of the highest viable punishment. We do not want Chinese and Pakistani spies within India. Indians don't have any love for Ajmal Kasab and the legislation will take its path. One factor is for certain, he is probably not escorted like a VIP together with the External Affairs Minister to Kandahar. Different legislation for exceptional groups for the reason that each and every neighborhood does now not comply with the identical social practices. The charter of India used to be drafted via intellectuals. The lesser beings don't seem to be mature ample to impeach it. If dictionary can not be observed available in the market, there's whatever essentially flawed. Check that out. By the way in which: If Nehru-Indira-Rajeev-Sonia-Rahul qualifies as a dynasty in Indian politics, what disqualifies, Nehru-Indira-Sanjay-Maneka-Varun from being a dynasty?

Answer 6

I don't know any Muslim Clerics but to answer you question there probably aren't any!!! Muslims are not known for being moderates but rather extremist!!!!

Answer 7

No. And I don't care to know any, even if there are any.