What is a "Muslim-Refusenik"?

JerrySeinfeld · March 29, 2006

Here is a link:

http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/thebook.ht...ublewithislamis

to a very interesting woman - a muslim woman - and self-proclaimed muslim-refusenik and author of the book "The Trouble With Islam Today"

Some excerpts:

The themes I'm exploring with the utmost honesty include:
the inferior treatment of women in Islam;

the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and

the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.

I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians have their Evangelicals. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God's sake, even Buddhists have fundamentalists.

But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam is literalism mainstream.Which means that when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims have no clue how to dissent, debate, revise or reform.

another:

Why I'm struggling with Islam
Irshad, Deeyah and Donya

As refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda, my family and I settled just outside of Vancouver in 1972. I grew up attending two types of schools: the secular public school of most North American kids and then, for several hours at a stretch every Saturday, the Islamic religious school (madressa).

I couldn't quite reconcile the open and tolerant world of my public school with the rigid and bigoted world inside my madressa. But I had enough faith to ask questions -- plenty of them.

My first question for my madressa teacher was, "Why can't girls lead prayer?" I graduated to asking more nuanced questions, such as, "If the Koran came to Prophet Muhammad as a message of peace, why did he command his army to kill an entire Jewish tribe?"

You can imagine that such questions irritated the hell out of my madressa teacher, who routinely put down women and trashed the Jews. He and I reached the ultimate impasse over yet another question: "Where," I asked, "is the evidence of the 'Jewish conspiracy' against Islam? You love to talk about it, but what's the proof?" That question, posed at the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa. Permanently.

and...

Liberal Muslims say that what I'm describing isn't "true" Islam. But these Muslims should own up to something: Prophet Muhammad himself said that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. By that standard, how Muslims actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that reality under the rug of theory is to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our fellow human beings.

VERY important...

A Muslim Refusenik is...
By Muslim Refusenik, I don't mean I refuse to be a Muslim. If I did, why would I care enough to write a book that puts me on the front lines of anger, hate, even death threats? By Muslim Refusenik, I mean I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah. Many Muslims applaud Jewish Refuseniks -- those soldiers who protest the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In the same spirit of conscientious dissent, we've got to protest the ideological occupation of Muslim minds. An occupation perpetrated by our own mullahs, imams and civic leaders.

Irshad engaging Muslims in Rotterdam, Netherlands

In that spirit, I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place?

My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?

Check the link for more intelligence...