www.stand4islam.blogspot.com: "Agressive Secularism"

About this blog

In recent times a plethora of misconceptions, misrepresentation and myths have been forged about Islam
and Muslims. Many western influentials from politicians, policymakers to judges have taken it upon
themselves to undermine the Islamic beliefs, values and rules so to make it palatable to their
egotistic minds and the secular liberal thoughts.

This blog is dedicated:-

1. To argue the point for Islam in its belief and systems and to refute the misconceptions.
2. To expose the weakness and contradictions of all forms of secularism.

21 Sept 2010

"Agressive Secularism"

Britain’s secular liberal establishment appears horrified by the Pope’s comments, and those of his advisor Cardinal Walter Kasper, about Britain’s secular society. The Pope said in his opening speech in the UK “Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society…In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate.”

Cardinal Kasper wrote on the eve of the Pope’s visit that “an aggressive new atheism has spread through Britain. If, for example, you wear a cross on British Airways, you are discriminated against.”

This trend has emerged strongly since 9/11 and led to a magnificent double standard. A letter in the Guardian on 15th September 2010 signed by secular evangelists such as Stephen Fry, Professor Richard Dawkins, Professor AC Grayling, Lord Avebury, and Peter Tatchell amongst others denounced the invitation of a state visit for the Pope and included in their reasoning the Pope’s illiberal views. It would be hard to find a letter with the same spectrum of signatories opposing the visits and hospitality shared between British governments and dictators across the world who actively torture and repress their own people.

In Britain, Europe and the United States secular liberal states are proving ever more their intolerance of people of all faiths – frequently ridiculing and demeaning adherents of religions – but most especially Islam.

Anyone who has witnessed calls for bans on hijabs and niqabs across Europe, as well as minarets; protests against mosques by right wing groups in Britain and even a call to ban the Quran in Holland will recognise an aggressive, unpleasant, even supremacist secular liberalism.
A new role for religion

Aggressive secularism stems from ignorance, fear and dogmatism. Over two centuries after the enlightenment, secular free market liberalism dominates in just about every important nation, yet the secular agenda seems to have stalled. Cynicism has surged. The sense of a strong society is diminishing. And when people are asked about how happy they are, the negativity is electric.

Yet, despite unprecedented prosperity and mass education, it is religion that is today providing a more confident, global and ethical vision, finding traction among all peoples, irrespective of race, colour, sex, age or geography. For supporters of a movement that is supposed to have lost the battle of ideas, religionists have been proving the soothsayers wrong. Why is this?

Firstly, more religious people are now questioning why their values should be suppressed within the public arena. History has taught us that some of the greatest social advancements were made by people motivated by their religious beliefs. The provision of economic and political rights for women in Islamic countries in the seventh century, the abolition of slavery in the UK, civil rights in America: all were done by people with impeccable religious credentials.

If some secularists had had their way, the activism of our Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and the campaigning of William Wilberforce or Martin Luther King would be whitewashed from history.

Secondly, despite historical attempts to generalise, many are now rejecting the absurd claim that religion stifles intellectual inquiry. We often hear dire warnings from western capitals about the dangers of the re-emergence of an Islamic caliphate. Yet it is almost undisputed that in its heyday, the caliphate was at the forefront of scientific advancement and community cohesion (contradicting the myth that religious-based systems oppress other faiths).

Thirdly, many are attracted to religion in the West because of what they see as an emerging social malaise and spiritual void. For them, modern society should aspire to be about more than GDP and rabid individualism. This has motivated many to articulate fresh ideas about work-life balance, racism, poverty alleviation and a more just foreign policy.

Lastly, people are rejecting the stale choice of religious fundamentalism versus intolerance. The debate is now centred on competing visions as to how best to achieve the universal ends of prosperity, security and education. But some liberal fundamentalists prefer to use secular society as an overarching ideology to marginalise any kind of religious influence.

Perhaps now is the time for everyone to formulate new paradigms, rather than to fight old culture wars.

For real answers and a real alternative, people need to look at what Islam offers.

[Taken from Hizb.org.uk]

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What they said...

“Islam represented the greatest military power on earth…It was the foremost economic power in the world…It had achieved the highest level so far in human history, in the arts and sciences of civilization...Islam in contrast created a world civilization, poly-ethnic, multiracial, international, one might even say intercontinental.”

[Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Orientalist and Historian, 2001]

"There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world. It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts…the civilization I'm talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600… Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage"

[Carly Fiorina, ex-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, 2001]

"For the first three centuries of its existence (circ. A.D 650-1000) the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities where the wisdom of the ancient world was preserved and appreciated, the Moslem world offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, then sunk in the night of the Dark Ages."

[Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D (Harvard), American political theorist and historian, 1932]

"Medieval Islam was technologically advanced and open to innovation. It achieved far higher literacy rates than in contemporary Europe;it assimilated the legacy of classical Greek civilization to such a degree that many classical books are now known to us only through Arabic copies. It invented windmills ,trigonometry, lateen sails and made major advances in metallurgy, mechanical and chemical engineering and irrigation methods. In the middle-ages the flow of technology was overwhelmingly from Islam to Europe rather from Europe to Islam. Only after the 1500's did the net direction of flow begin to reverse."

[Jared Diamond, UCLA sociologist and Author, 1997]

"No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity and endeavour so many and so varied races of mankind. The great Muslim communities of Africa, India and Indonesia, perhaps also the small community in Japan, show that Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of the East and west is to be replaced by cooperation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition."

[Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, Professor at Harvard University, 1932]

“The Muhammadan Law which is binding on all -- from the crowned head to the meanest subject is a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned and the most enlightened jurisprudence that ever existed in the world.”

[Edmund Burke, British Statesman and Philosopher, 1789]

"The Exile here is not like in our homeland. The Turks hold respectable Jews in esteem. Here and in Alexandria, Egypt, Jews are the chief officers and administrators of the customs, and the king’s revenues. No injuries are perpetuated against them in all the empire. Only this year, in consequence of the extraordinary expenditure caused by the war against Shah Tahmsap al-Sufi, were the Jews required to make advances of loans to the princes."

[David dei Rossi, Jewish Traveller 17CE, quoted by Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands]

"The notable religious tolerance towards Christians and Jew under Muslim rule had given way to the uncompromising zealotry of Spanish Inquisition. Jews and Muslims thus fled Spain with large numbers of Jews immigrating to the Ottoman Empire which was known for its tolerance to the Jews."

[Graham Fuller, Author and former CIA, 1995]

“If there is much misunderstanding in the West about the nature of Islam, there is also much ignorance about the debt our own culture and civilization owe to the Islamic world. It is a failure, which stems, I think, from the straightjacket of history, which we have inherited. The medieval Islamic world, from central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and systems of beliefs, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history”

[Charles Philip Arthur George, HRH The Prince of Wales, 1993]

"...Not being subject to the Sharia, Jews and Christians were free to go to their own religious authorities for adjudication of disputes; but in many cases they went instead to the [Muslim] Qadi"

[Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of History and Author, 2004]

"Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of. We possess great fortunes; much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed by heavy taxes and our commerce is free and unhindered. Rich are the fruits of the earth. Everything is cheap and each one of us lives in freedom. Here a Jew is not compelled to wear a yellow star as a badge of shame as is the case in Germany where even wealth and great fortune is a curse for a Jew because he therewith arouses jealousy among the Christians and they devise all kinds of slander against him to rob him of his gold. Arise my brethren, gird up your loins, collect up your forces and come to us."

[In his book 'Constantinople', Philip Mansel quotes a rabbi in Turkey writing to his brethren in Europe where they were facing increasing persecution after 1453]

"Praise be to the beneficent God for his mercy towards me! Kings of the earth, to whom his [the Caliph’s] magnificence and power are known, bring gifts to him, conciliating his favour by costly presents, such as the king of the Germans, the king of the Gebalim, the king of Constantinople, and others. All their gifts pass through my hands, and I am charged with making gifts in return. (Let my lips express praise to the God in heaven who so far extends his loving kindness towards me without any merit of my own, but in the fullness of his mercies.) I always ask the ambassadors of these monarchs about our brethren the Jews, the remnant of the captivity, whether they have heard anything concerning the deliverance of those who have pined in bondage and had found no rest."

[Hasdai Ibn Shaprut (915-990 CE) Jewish physician, chief minister of Islamic Caliphate in Cordova, 'The Jewish Caravan']

"In Baghdad there are about forty thousand Jews, and they dwell in security, prosperity, and honour under the great Caliph [al-Mustanjid, 1160-70 CE], and amongst them are great sages, the Heads of the Academies engaged in the study of the Law…’"

[Benjamin of Tudela, Rabbi in Baghdad in the year 1168 CE, 'The Jew in the Medieval World']

"Those Eastern thinkers of the ninth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Califate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.

[Leon Ostorog, French Jurist]

"The debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries or revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence"

[Robert Briffault, Novelist and Historian, 1928]

"The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and for more than a thousand years there was not a scientific man of note except in Arabia"

[Oliver Joseph Lodge, Writer and Professor of Physics, 1893]

“Thus, when Muslims crossed the straits of Gibraltar from North Africa in 711 and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, Jews welcomed them as liberators from Christian Persecution.”

[Zion Zohar, Jewish scholar at Florida International University, 2005]

“Throughout much of the period in question, Arabic served as the global language of scholarship, and learned men of all stripes could travel widely and hold serious and nuanced discussions in this lingua franca. Medieval Western scholars who wanted access to the latest findings also needed to master the Arabic Tongue or work from translations by those who had done so.”

[Jonathan Lyons, Author, Writer and Lecturer, 2009]