Two stories you might want to chew over, Part I:

As a regular visitor to timesonline.co.uk, the website of The Times of London, I read one story on Sunday with particular interest.

The article claims that Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, of a group called Minhaj-ul-Quran, has written a 600-page document which declares that attacks on innocent citizens are "absolutely against the teachings of Islam." Such a statement is clearly a good thing and will be welcomed almost universally outside of Islam. I am greatly encouraged that finally a mainstream Muslim group has taken a stance on the highly divisive and worrying matters of terrorism and extremism.

We are told that Islam is a religion of peace, and this in turn allows people to turn and deliver what they see as a winning blow by declaring such a title to be preposterous given the appararent Muslim predilection for blowing things up and treating women as sub-human. But I don't see things that way. I reserve my judgement until I have learned a significant amount more than I know at the present. Yes, terrible things are done by Muslims, any maybe even disproportinately so compared to the rest of the world's religions, but wasn't Christianity as a whole absolutely vile to the Jews in the Middle Ages? Now that the wild excesses of Christianity have subsided, it has become a relatively placid faith, but it too was a cause for rampant murder and strife centuries ago. We would do well not to judge Islam by it's fundamentalists. Yes, if we look to the Koran we will find numerous 'proofs' that it is, by nature, a violent religion. but so too are the Torah and the New Testament replete with verses that appear extreme. The key is in the interpretation. If Islam can prove itself to be, at its core, a religion of peace, then that is what its Imams and clerics must do at a time when its name is being seemingly besmirched by a violent and noisy minority. We hear so often of the silent majority, but there is no need for this to be a reality. Certainly not in the twenty-first century.

As a religious Jew, I obviously believe my religion to be the one true religion, but that doesn't mean that I see other religions as being totally, utterly evil. Nor does it mean that I perceive other religions' followers to be beyond hope. It is not against Judaic thought in any way to believe that a righteous gentile can be much, much closer to God than a Jew; and there are surely many such cases.

As such, while I think that Muslims have got this religion thing hopelessly wrong, (and no doubt they think much the same of me,) I don't feel the need to let them know that Judaism is the one true path — there's simply no point. Similarly, I don't think there's much point trying to sell Zionism to a nation who feel, rightly or wrongly, that this ideology violates their own rights. That's not to say that if a Muslim wants a reasoned debate with me on Zionism I will refuse, merely that I don't go out of my way to convince others as to the relative merits of my belief systems.

But while I feel that I need not justify Zionism, I applaud Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri for his actions. He doesn't need to explain Islam to anyone else — it is his belief that being a Muslim is the correct way of life and he is entitled to it. What I applaud him for, however, is that he has decided to take a stance against those extremists who are hijacking his religion. (And I give Islam the benefit of the doubt here, because there is a doubt in my mind as to whether it truly is the vicious religion it is sometimes made out to be.) When I originally read this article, I accessed the Times website from my mobile phone. Beacuse of the limitations of mobile phone techonology, the Times' mobile internet site is stripped down and I didn't see the picture of Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri that accompanies this article on the website when accessed from a regular computer. I worried that this man wouldn't be an orthodox Muslim, but would turn out to be some kind of reformist.

Having seen the picture now, it would seem that he is an orthodox Muslim, though. My concern was that had he not been a man who represented orthodox Islam, he would have been accused of selling out to the Western world and Western ideology. In much the same way that I regard the conservative and reform Judaism with deep distrust, (for I believe that they are constantly distancing themselves from original Judaism,) I am happy that this man seems to be a part of the orthodox Muslim establishment. If (orthodox) Islam really is a "Religion of Peace," then it needs to be proactive and make sure that all those who act violently in its name are thoroughly denounced. It seems unlikely that honour killings and suicide bombings can be actively prevented by the fundamentalists' fellow Muslims, but an atmosphere in which such heinous activities are branded as utterly unacceptable might help.

To be continued...