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...

A cause for hope

Although I blog fairly regularly, I don't think I've ever posted an entry of a personal nature here. Last week, I attended the Nefesh b'Nefesh International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem (read my report for the Jerusalem Post here) and one of the speakers mentioned that while blogs often have specific topics, it's still nice to write those "slice of life" entries and share your experiences with others. The speaker went on to explain that for a person living in Efrat, for example, it might not seem all too interesting at first to describe one's daily commute, but to someone living on the other side of the world the idea of waking up and facing the Judaean hills, driving through biblical landscape on the way to work in the knowledge that the only traffic jam one might encounter would be from a wayward flock of sheep - well, that might be almost exotic to some. With this in mind, I've decided that it's high time that I share some of my experiences.

The first thing I want to relate is an event that occured last Monday. I had locked my bike outside the Shuk and after retrieving it, noticed that somebody had touched my gears, as they had been reset from 21st gear (3 and 7) to something like 8, as the numbers were lower around 2 and 4. I was a little bit annoyed, but I soon became genuinely irritated when I saw that the gear chain had been knocked off, too. For those readers who haven't had to put a bike's chain back on the gears, I should explain that you get your hands dirty and oily from touching the greasy chain. After realising that I had no option, I set about fixing the bike.

Just as I was about to get started, an elderly man stopped to ask me if I could help him by taking his heavy bags as he walked to the bus stop on the other side of the road. I told him that I needed to fix my bike, but that I would be with him in a second. The man was rather insistent, but I explained that I would need a little time first.

Putting a bicycle chain back in place (illustrative)

After fidgeting with the bike's chain for a few seconds to no avail, an Arab teenager, almost certainly one of the many Arab workers in the Shuk, strode towards my bike, took it from me gently and in a split-second had the chain back on. Hugely impressed and appreciative of his kindness, I thanked him and shook his hand. It was truly heartening to see that despite what the media makes out to be total disharmony between Jews and Arabs, there's still co-operation between the two groups and away from the media spotlight, there are still instances like this that give you hope. But the boy, unaware of my goofy smile, then turned round to the old man, took his bags and walked him across the road. If there's one thing I can take from this it is that while we can never work with extremists, there will definitely be people "on the other side" who are not extreme and who want peace too. It is up to us to find a way of working with them and alienating terrorists and those who incite hatred and violence against us.

You gotta love Saudi Arabia!

Hat Tip to Elder of Ziyon : The following is a direct quote from his site.

Daily life in Saudi Arabia
From Arab News, a story meant to show the quirkier side of life in Saudi Arabia:

BAHA, 1 January 2008 — You’re out shopping with your wife and children and you get into a disagreement with your wife. What do you do? One man did the unthinkable, he announced to hundreds of shoppers that he was divorcing his wife, the Al-Riyadh daily reported yesterday.

According to the report, the man left his wife and children to do his own shopping. As he was coming back to rejoin his family, he saw a young man approach his wife and give her his cell phone number on a small piece of paper. The wife took the paper and put it inside her bag and continued shopping as usual, not aware that her husband saw what happened.

When he approached her and asked her to give him the bag, she refused. He forcefully took the bag and dug out the piece of paper. Enraged, the man walked over to the cashier and grabbing hold of the store’s microphone, he announced to shoppers that he was divorcing his wife and had no intention of ever getting back with her.

He then stormed out of the shopping mall and left his wife and two children behind.

This is a funny story, emblematic of a place where all you need to do if you want a divorce is proclaim it. But things turn darker with the next, explanatory paragraph about what daily life is like in a theocracy where women are so highly "honoured" that they have to cover themselves in public:

Women being harassed in public places is a common occurrence in Saudi Arabia and the harassers can often get very aggressive and insist that the women pay attention to their advances and take their telephone numbers. Women often resort to accepting telephone numbers so they will be left alone.

Doesn't this demolish one of the major reasons that Muslims use to justify the hijab?