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In today's edition of The New York Times, William Dalrymple, author of Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Alfred A. Knopf: 2009) writes on the current uproar about the proposed construction of an Islamic cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. He warns that viewing all Muslims through a monolithic lens of radicalism could have the unintended consequence of weakening possible relationships with moderate Muslims.
He explained:
The problem with such claims [arguments being made against the proposed Mosque] goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion...
While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.
At the same time, he provides a link to a seminal paper published by the Rand Corporation entitled Building Moderate Muslim Networks (2007). Among other things, the paper gets into the nuances that are ignored in overgeneralized, often high-pitched claims that amount to notions that all or most of Islam/Muslims are radical, "true" Muslims are not moderate, etc., and debunks the ill-informed monolithic perspective. It even provides an example of a Fatwa issued against Osama Bin Laden by the Islamic Commission of Spain that declares, in part, "That Islam rejects terrorism in all its manifestations, being the death or damage to innocent human beings or to their properties" and that "those who commit terrorist acts violate Koranic teachings and thus turn apostates who have left Islam."
He explained:
The problem with such claims [arguments being made against the proposed Mosque] goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion...
While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.
At the same time, he provides a link to a seminal paper published by the Rand Corporation entitled Building Moderate Muslim Networks (2007). Among other things, the paper gets into the nuances that are ignored in overgeneralized, often high-pitched claims that amount to notions that all or most of Islam/Muslims are radical, "true" Muslims are not moderate, etc., and debunks the ill-informed monolithic perspective. It even provides an example of a Fatwa issued against Osama Bin Laden by the Islamic Commission of Spain that declares, in part, "That Islam rejects terrorism in all its manifestations, being the death or damage to innocent human beings or to their properties" and that "those who commit terrorist acts violate Koranic teachings and thus turn apostates who have left Islam."
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