"The Two Islams"

I was reading an excerpt from a book, Chasing a Mirage by Tareq Fatah, this morning from the National Post. The excerpt has a promising beginning, talking about Shariah law in islamic countries but then takes a nose dive when the author suggests that if Mohammed where alive today then he would shed a tear by the way islam is practised.

Muhammad would have wept to see how his message was misused to consolidate power and subjugate the people.

If in fact, Mohammed were alive today, I am almost certainly sure that OBL would be his right hand man.

In August, 1990, 45 representatives from Muslim countries, under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, signed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam. The result leaves much to be desired. Although successive Islamic declarations on human rights have tried to present themselves as compatible with the principle of universal basic rights, a number of severe contradictions exist between these declarations and Western constitutionalism. The most important is that Islam does not accept separating religion from the state and societal affairs. According to Articles 23 and 24 of the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, all rights and freedoms are subject to Islamic sharia. In this framework, human rights lose their unconditional character and their focus on the protection of the individual vis-a-vis any kind of power.

....

By looking the other way, the intelligentsia and middle classes have become complicit in these crimes. They justify their inaction as patriotism, where they stand in solidarity with the Islamic State, with the misguided idea that those who fight for universal human rights are somehow working for Western imperialism or represent the interests of Judeo-Christian civilization.

One could say there are two Islams that Muslims have introduced to the world. One, peaceful, spiritual and deeply respectful of the "other," an Islam that relied on the Quranic expression, "To you your religion, to me mine." It is this Islam that today makes Indonesia the world's largest Muslim nation with 250 million people.

The second, parallel to this spiritual Islam, is an equally militant stream of puritanism and supremacist philosophy. It sought statehood, political power and mastery, not just over the conquered, but over competing Muslim interests as well. At the core of this divergence from spirituality and love of the divine was the notion of racial, tribal and familial superiority, which gave birth to countless monarchist dynasties, each battling the other, all invoking Islam as their raison d'etre. Muhammad would have wept to see how his message was misused to consolidate power and subjugate the people.

Read it all.