Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Dude…You have got to be kidding me…

With the recent arrest of five young American Muslims in Sargodha, Pakistan on alleged charges of terrorism by Pakistani authorities, many of the over 7 million American Muslims were collectively groaning and rolling our eyes whilst saying:

“Are you kidding me? Thanks a lot, you idiots…”

A recent CNN article noted that the potential radicalization of American Muslim teenagers has now become known as “jihadi cool,” a term coined by author/psychiatrist (and former CIA official) Dr. Marc Sageman.

“The path for a lot of these kids is essentially like at-risk gangbangers, who want to ’stand up’ for their community, to address grievances of the global Muslim community more effectively than they’ve seen the elder generation address them since 9/11.”

Many professional ‘de-radicalizers’ have said that the great majority of these young men have little sense of what they are doing. They are “extremely shallow theologically and even ideologically.”

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The Massacre in Maguindanao in the Philippines

Maria A. Ressa
Head, ABS-CBN News & Current Affairs
Former CNN Jakarta Bureau Chief

You can’t escape the laws of physics. Newton’s third law of motion states: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the world of governments and their security forces, it’s called blowback – a term first coined by the US Central Intelligence Agency in classified documents to describe US and British covert operations in Iran in 1953. They helped overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, setting in motion a chain of events which inspired the revival of Islamic fundamentalism around the world.

Blowback happened again in Afghanistan in the late 80’s when the US funneled more than $3 billion, through Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to build up the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. That sowed the seeds for 9/11 and the major terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 2001 to 2009. Among the key beneficiaries was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who helped train Osama bin Laden and thousands of Southeast Asian militants including the founder of the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, some of the Bali and JW Marriott bombers.

Blowback happened in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines – where warlords with private armies funded by the state wield political power.

It’s a complex situation: the power structure of government is a thin overlay on top of a complex social hierarchy based on families or clans. These clans periodically clash – feuds known as rido, which can be ignited by the flimsiest of reasons – a quarrel over women or a verbal slight. Clans became the foundation of electoral politics and determined the distribution of power and resources.

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Sajida Faraj enjoys a Thanksgiving meal.

Hamid Dabashi
Special to CNN

The serendipitous occurrence of this year's Thanksgiving holiday on the same evening as the Muslim Eid-ul-Adha is a festive occasion to reflect on the place of Islam in American collective consciousness and on Muslims as Americans.

On the same evening that millions of Americans gather around their Thanksgiving dinner to celebrate this most American of holidays, even more millions of Muslims around the globe, including the growing number of American Muslims, will do the same - celebrating as well one of the most definitive moments of their faith - Prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for his God.

This holiday celebration comes soon after the tragic incident at Fort Hood, when the atrocious act of a mass murderer put Islam and Muslims under some pressure to either denounce or defend their faith.

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Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN

Outside a Manhattan mosque where the imam preaches against terrorism, the brothers of the "Revolution Muslim" are spreading a different message.

Protected by the Constitution of the country they detest, radical Muslim converts like Yousef al-Khattab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed preach that the killing of U.S. troops overseas is justified. In their thinking, so were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - and so are attacks on almost any American.

"Americans will always be a target - and a legitimate target - until America changes its nature in the international arena," Mohammed said in an interview to air on tonight's "AC 360."

Al-Khattab and Mohammed consider al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden their model.

"I love him like I can't begin to tell you, because he doesn't seem to have done anything wrong from the sharia," al-Khattab said, referring to Islamic law. "If you're asking me if I love him as a Muslim, I love him more than I love myself."

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Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Most of the world's 1.57 billion Muslims know that the Holy Quran states quite clearly that, "Anyone who kills a human being ... it shall be as though he has killed all of mankind. ... If anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he has saved the lives of all of mankind."

Accordingly, it should come as little surprise to any reasonable observer that when Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan recently committed his shocking acts of mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas, America's Muslim community of over 7 million felt an added sense of horror and sadness at this senseless attack against the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces.

True to form, many conservative media pundits wasted little time in pointing to reports that Hasan had said "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is great") at the start of his murderous rampage. News coverage continuously showed the looping convenience store black-and-white videotape footage of Hasan wearing traditional white Islamic garb.

First of all, someone simply saying "Allahu Akbar" while committing an act of mass murder no more makes their criminal act "Islamic" than a Christian uttering the "Hail Mary" while murdering an abortion medical provider, or someone chanting "Onward, Christian Soldiers" while bombing a gay nightclub, would make their act "Christian" in nature.

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Doha, Qatar: A city skyline awash with cranes and towers powered by abundant oil and gas supplies.

Arsalan Iftikhar, creator of themuslimguy.com
CNN

From The Matrix to the Lord of the Rings to….a $150 million Hollywood biopic film about the Prophet Muhammad?

Yup, you read it correctly…

As reported recently by The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, “[Academy Award-winning] producer Barrie Osborne cast Keanu Reeves as the messiah in The Matrix and helped defeat the dark lord Sauron in his record-breaking Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now the Oscar-winning American film-maker is set to embark on his most perilous quest to date: making a big-screen biopic of the prophet Muhammad.”

With a whopping estimated budget of around $150 million, the blockbuster film will chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings.

Mr. Osborne recently told Reuters that he envisions the movie as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam.”

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In June, President Obama urged a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and Muslims in a speech in Cairo, Egypt.

Cynthia P. Schneider and Nadia Oweidat
RAND Corporation

“Where are the moderate voices from the Arab world?”

This common lament often leads to nostalgic evocations of the Golden Age of Islam, which stretched from the 7th to the 16th century. President Obama recently harked back to this period of Islamic enlightenment, innovation and tolerance in his Cairo speech, in which he attempted to redefine the relationship between Muslims and the United States.

Actually, there is no need to reach back 1,000 years to find Muslim advocates for tolerance and moderation. There is a need, however, to stop silencing the moderates alive today.

The Arab world is rich in literature - including a surge of new novels and non-fiction - that examines all aspects of Arab life and advocates a vision of a multi-cultural society that respects human rights. These works draw on the traditions of the medieval Golden Age, and of the Arab Renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Cairo was to the Arab world what Paris was to the West.

Eight decades ago, the seminal scholar Rifa’i Al-Tahtawi, once head of Al Azhar (Obama’s host in Cairo and the equivalent of the Vatican for Sunni Muslims), advocated tolerance towards non-Muslims and engaged in vibrant debates with contemporary European intellectuals. In his 1830 book An Imam in Paris, he argued for an open, moderate version of Islam. At a time when Egypt offered only religious education, he also urged the state to make modern, secular education accessible to all citizens.

Such ideas were not restricted to Egypt. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, the pious Syrian scholar Abdul Rahman Al-Kawakibi urged the separation of mosque and state to protect the purity of Islam from political manipulation.

Today’s Arab authors also bravely delve into taboo subjects from the correct interpretation of Islam to women’s and minority rights, government corruption, extremism and political oppression. Some advocate a more tolerant version of Islam, one that has become increasingly marginalized. Why are these moderate voices not better known in the Middle East or the West? To begin with, they are banned in most of the Arab world. And it isn’t just governments censoring and persecuting them. Equally important are the self-appointed "thought police" who clamp down on ideas they deem too liberal.

In their quest for legitimacy, many other Arab governments have also institutionalized an interpretation of Islam that frowns upon critical thinking, enforces blind obedience to the ruler as an Islamic duty, and ruthlessly silences dissent. This has helped dictatorships across the region to last for decades with no hope for a genuine rotation of power.

The notorious case of Egyptian Islamic scholar Nasr Abu Zayd illustrates how governments collude with or ignore the intimidation of progressives by fundamentalists. Conservatives branded Abu Zayd a heretic for penning a moderate interpretation of the Koran and filed suit against him in a Cairo court. To the shock of Arabs who support a separation of church and state, the court supported the heresy charge and, in 1996, ordered Abu Zayd divorced from his wife. (Apostates are not allowed to be married to Muslim women.) The couple went into exile amid death threats.

In 2006, Egyptian police went from bookstore to bookstore confiscating copies of a book called The Modern Sheikhs and the Industry of Religious Extremism, which urges religious and government authorities to play a more positive role on such issues as the environment, corruption and women’s rights. They were acting at the behest of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Center, which under Egyptian law, has the right to censor books and other cultural products.

Novels such as The Sacred Union, which exposes the lack of religious freedoms and women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, are banned in most of the Arab world. The author, a Saudi woman, wrote under a pseudonym to protect her safety.

Publishers as well are persecuted. Mummad Madbouli, the legendary owner of Madbouli Books in Cairo, has been one of the few who dared to publish and sell banned books. He has faced more than 25 lawsuits and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Due to Madbouli’s acclaim among the public and intellectuals alike, the prison sentence was never carried out.

Yet the popularity of books such as The Yacoubian Building by Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany, now in its eighth reprinting, attest to a growing demand for works that are authentically Arab and not doctrinaire. Like the Nobel Prize winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Al Aswany candidly exposes social and political problems plaguing Egypt through stories about the lives of ordinary people - a refreshing departure from the “blame the West and Israel” bombast that Arab publics are typically served.

Still, with few exceptions, the works of these new Arab writers, as well as their predecessors from the last century, are not found in bookstores in the Middle East today. And the contributions of the Arab Renaissance are unknown to all but a tiny intellectual elite.

What is accessible are religious tracts, both historic and contemporary, from authors such Sayid Qutob, who is cited by Osama Bin Laden, and Yousif al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric who has been banned from entering Britain due to his extremist views.

With a click of a mouse anyone can access entire libraries of jihadi texts available online for free. The banned books of moderates could find their way to Arab readers were they posted online, but they are nowhere to be found. Yet it is these writers, contemporary and renaissance, who offer Muslims a tolerant, open-minded alternative, anchored within their own traditions. And they offer the Obama administration the possibility of forging a genuine connection with Arab publics.

The administration aims to replace the advocacy of American values with a new focus on empowering local voices. Those policies, taking shape at the State Department under a new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith A. McHale, former CEO of the Discovery Channel, represent a promising departure from the failed “spoon-fed democracy” approach that Admiral Mike Mullen rightly criticized recently.

If the U.S. government learns anything from the failure of the U.S.-funded al-Hurrah television station, it should be that foreign bureaucracies should not manufacture messages of democracy and tolerance to be broadcast at the Arab world. Such impulses need to come from within. They should be organic and authentic and free of government fingerprints.

What the United States and its allies can do, however, is help ensure that the voices of moderation are given a platform, equal to that given to fundamentalists such as al-Qaradawi. The Obama administration could start by condemning censorship and persecution of writers, and encouraging investments in education, literacy, libraries and broader Internet access. Non-governmental groups others could support the publication and dissemination of moderate Arab authors through universities and other institutions, such as the Library of Alexandria, which plans to re-issue the Arabic classics.

Westerners cannot and should not attempt to script Arab thought. But they can support a return to the standards of critical thinking and open inquiry that once characterized the Arab world.

Editor's Note: Cynthia P. Schneider, a former ambassador to the Netherlands, is a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, which will publish her forthcoming study, A New Way Forward: Encouraging Greater Cultural Engagement with the Muslim World. Nadia Oweidat is a researcher at the RAND Corporation and a D. Phil candidate at Oxford University.

Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

According to a recent September 2009 study completed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, nearly six-in-ten American adults (58 percent) say “that Muslims are subject to a lot of discrimination in the United States; far more than say the same about Jews, evangelical Christians, atheists or Mormons…”

In fact, of all the minority demographic groups discussed in the September 2009 Pew Forum study, only “gays and lesbians are seen as facing more discrimination in America than Muslims”, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of the American public saying there is a lot of discrimination against homosexuals in the United States today.

Some of the other key results below from the September 2009 Pew Forum Study revolve around average Americans asked to finish this statement “There is a lot of discrimination against…”

According to the Pew Forum study, the top 5 responses were (in descending order):

- Gays and lesbians (64%)
- Muslims (58%)
- Hispanics (52%)
- Blacks (49%) and
- Women (37%)

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Eboo Patel
For the Washington Post

Are young Muslims going to be bombs of destruction or bridges of cooperation? That's the central question asked in Christiane Amanpour's documentary Generation Islam, which aired on CNN Thursday night, and for which I was interviewed.

There are 780 million Muslims in the world under the age of 25 – over 11 percent of the world's population. The median age in Afghanistan is under 18; the median age in Iraq under 20. Too many of these young people grow up in poverty. And while poverty doesn't cause extremism, it does create conditions that extremist groups like the Taliban exploit.

The Taliban's strategy is simple: build schools in villages too poor (and too poorly served by their governments) to afford their own.

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President Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, urges a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Eboo Patel
For On Faith
washingtonpost.com

Whoever selects and assigns the books on Islam for the Sunday New York Times Book Review needs to widen his reading and add some new names to his rolodex.

Last week there was a rave review of Bruce Bawer's alarmist book Surrender (the subtitle says it all: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom).

This week, the cover of the Book Review has a picture of a group of fully covered Muslim women set against a crowd of 'normal-looking' mostly-white Europeans with the headline "Strangers in the Land".

The review betrays more about the opinions of the reviewer – the noted and controversial academic Fouad Ajami – than the book under consideration, Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

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Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Octavia Nasr
Middle East Affairs Editor

“Annihilate the rioters,” demanded one of Iran’s fundamentalist clerics during Friday prayer. He believes that the opposition “defied the orders” of Iran’s Supreme Leader, who “rules by God’s design.” Therefore, “they should be punished mercilessly." Either way, his words couldn’t be harsher or more extreme. Some would say those words couldn’t be more un-Islamic.

The word Islam means “surrender.” The entire religion is based on surrendering one’s self, speech, action and thoughts to god. When moderate Muslims hear what this Mullah has called for, they wonder which brand of Islam he is advocating.

The first pillar in Islamic faith is the declaration called “Shahda” that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammed is his prophet.

The first verse of every chapter in the holy Muslim book, the Quran, goes like this, “In the name of God, most merciful, most compassionate.” Devout Muslims start many of their activities or speech with these glorious words.

Where is the compassion in the Iranian mullah’s speech? Where is the Mercy?

He’s directing his wrath at his own people; their only crime was to ask for an honest vote and to insist that their votes counted in a timely presidential election. They are the ones who shouted from their rooftops every night since their demonstrations began, “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar” –God is Great. They are the ones who were denied their legal right to demonstrate so they had to defy the regime and take to the streets anyway.

They are the Iranian opposition movement, young people, mostly students, many women who were kicked and beaten in the streets; they were shot at, detained and even killed. They were called traitors and terrorists. Despite all that, they kept going out for more show offs with Iranian police and a brutal volunteer militia known as the Basij.

The Iranian regime imposed a crackdown on foreign media which made the story impossible to cover freely. The world ended up with two views of on what’s going on: The government perspective came through the state media, radio, TV, newspapers and websites. The opposition turned itself into a media outlet where everyone with a cell phone became a correspondent. They uploaded their images to video-sharing websites and interacted with the world through social media. They provided raw, unedited picture to the entire world.

Now one cleric vowing to “teach them a lesson” is a sign of more brutality and more bloodshed to come. The only difference is that when it happens, if it happens, it will be behind closed doors. We can’t count on Iranians who turned their cell phones into newsgathering machines and became the story and journalists telling it at the same time.

What tomorrow will bring them is a mystery that no one is there to witness or report on.

President Obama states the importance he places on interfaith cooperation in Cairo

Elise Labott
CNN State Department Producer

One might think that hiring an envoy to handle outreach to the Muslim world would be something the State Department would want to tout.

Instead, the move was apparently no news for diplomats at Foggy Bottom, who failed to make the appointment public.

This week Secretary of State Clinton tapped Farah Pandith, who previously worked on Muslim outreach in Europe, to the post, which will deal with the wider Muslim world.

But State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly only confirmed in Indian news reports - only after being asked – that Pandith, a Kashmiri-American, had been selected for the job.

"Yes," he said. "She's actually a friend of mine. I worked with her very closely in the European Bureau, Farah Pandith... The secretary has appointed her to more of a global role."

During his inaugural speech President Barack Obama pledged to seek a "new way forward" with the Muslim world "based on mutual interest and respect," after eight years of tense relations between Muslims and the Bush Administration. During his speech in Cairo earlier this month, Obama again said he would "seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect."

Still, Kelly was unclear on when Clinton tapped Pandith, saying he believed it was within the past few days. Asked why the post had not been made public, Kelly said an announcement was sent out to the "State Department community," but promised more information.

Ahmed shops for an abbaya in a high-end store in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Qanta A. Ahmed
Special to CNN

A judge in Saudi Arabia has said husbands are allowed to slap their wives if they spend lavishly, a Saudi newspaper reported this past weekend. In one fell swoop, the judge debased Islam, vilified the kingdom and disregarded the ideals the Saudi monarch himself embraces.

Islam is very clear on this issue: Both a husband physically chastising his wife for "overspending" and a judge "upholding justice" by sanctioning this abuse would be acting counter to Islam's ideals of compassion and justice.

There is no basis in Islamic theology to support domestic abuse of any kind and specifically none pertaining to the matter of a wife's spending pattern.

What is critically important to note is that the judge is flagrantly in opposition to King Abdullah's very public stance against both domestic violence and myopic clerics.

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Michael Wolfe
Special to CNN

"The media is dying." It's the title of a Twitter page and a prime topic of conversation among reporters.

Enter a room full of journalists, and you'll hear constant anxious chatter about dying newspapers and massive layoffs at print publications.

Just one example: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently became the first major newspaper to cease its print edition and go exclusively online, after more than 150 years of chronicling the city's history.

As a writer who's been in the game for years - over 30 and counting - I'm challenged by all there is to learn and at times overwhelmed as I watch old media gradually head toward extinction. Yet, as a Muslim writer, I am excited by the world of new possibilities. Why? Because I recognize that mastering the online world can unleash a great force to promote understanding among people.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight to watch all of the CNN Special Lifting the Veil at 11 p.m. ET.

In this clip from the CNN Presents special "Lifting the Veil", Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy speaks to a child bride.

Tom Foreman | Bio
AC360° Correspondent

You have to give this to President Obama – he seems to have no fear about making a tough sell. Here it is, Easter week, the holiest time of year for the world’s roughly two billion Christians, and he’s out talking up the notion of how Muslims deserve more respect.

Considering our actions in the world of late, it may be a good idea to try to make nice, but back home it’s a little like preaching against beer in Milwaukee. Or against bonuses on Wall Street. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll finds that while 51 percent of the public says we should trust Muslim nations as allies just as much as we trust anyone else, 48 percent believe we should trust them less.

If you don’t know why Americans feel that way, welcome to the country where September 11, the continuing whispers from Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Danish cartoon controversy, and the always entertaining idea about the Taliban offering marriage counseling, all seem to remind Americans that some of the folks belonging to the second largest religion in the world may not be as keen to get along with us.

Ant that’s unfortunate because a poll last year taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that a majority of American Christians are now willing to accept that non-Christians can also be headed for eternal salvation. In many churches it is no longer, to paraphrase AC/DC, “my way or the highway to hell.” Of course, that doesn’t address the growing number of non-faithful, who may take offense at the very concept of God, but that’s a debate for another day.

But it all comes down to a game of percentages. Most Muslims are family-loving, peace-loving, decent people who seemingly want nothing more than to live and let live. But most Americans, contrary to what the President suggests, do not deal regularly with Muslims on either a personal or professional level, thus raising their level of unawareness. Muslims are less than one percent of the American population and outside of major urban areas, they are all but invisible. There are more than twice as many Mormons in this nation and Mitt Romney can tell you he had an uphill climb as a politician who belongs to that church, even though his religion started in this country.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have historic reasons to be closer since all three faiths descended from the Biblical character, Abraham. But there are historic reasons why they clash, too, and President Obama may find changing America’s mind is very tough, even if he has the faith to move mountains.

Jonathan Martin
Politico

During his presidential campaign, Barack Hussein Obama rarely made an appearance.

He spoke little of his childhood in Indonesia, or his Muslim relatives. He battled rumors that he is Muslim. He struggled to appear not as somehow exotic but as the everyman.

But as he embarks on a new campaign to win over the Muslim world, Obama is calling attention to the nontraditional aspects of his upbringing like never before — hoping to turn his biggest political liability at home into a powerful asset abroad.

He’s not merely portraying himself as a break from George W. Bush’s policies, but as a leader whose unique background can help him better understand the world.

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President Obama, in Turkey, says the United States is not at war with Islam. CNN's Ed Henry reports.

Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta
The Washington Post

Most Americans think President Obama's pledge to "seek a new way forward" with the Muslim world is an important goal, even as nearly half hold negative views about Islam and a sizable number say that even mainstream adherents to the religion encourage violence against non-Muslims, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

There is still a broad lack of familiarity with the world's second-largest religion - 55 percent of those polled said they are without a basic understanding of the teachings and beliefs of Islam, and most said they do not know anyone who is Muslim. While awareness has increased in recent years, underlying views have not improved.

About half, 48 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of Islam, the highest in polls since late 2001. Nearly three in 10, or 29 percent, said they see mainstream Islam as advocating violence against non-Muslims; although more, 58 percent, said it is a peaceful religion.

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