Mick Hartley

The Secular Islam Summit in St Petersburg (no, not that St Petersburg: this one’s in Florida) have produced a St Petersburg Declaration:

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

We see no colonialism, racism, or so-called “Islamaphobia” in submitting Islamic practices to criticism or condemnation when they violate human reason or rights.

There’s more here:

At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no “moderate” Muslims.

There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” who doesn’t want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

There are Muslim runaways: People like Afshin Ellian, who in 1983 fled Iran — and the threat of execution — on camelback and is now a professor of law at the University of Leiden in Holland. (Now threatened by European jihadists, he lives with round-the-clock police protection.) There are experts on Islamic law: People like Hasan Mahmoud, a native Bangladeshi who, as director of Shariah at the Muslim Canadian Congress, was instrumental in overturning Ontario’s once-legal Shariah court last year.

There are even a few practicing Muslims here, such as Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary “Faith Without Fear” airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a “radical traditionalist” and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates and reformers: “Moderate Muslims denounce terror that’s committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it,” she says. “Reform-minded Muslims denounce terror that’s committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it.”

The opening panel on Monday was chaired by Phyllis Chesler, Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York. I wonder what the other attendees at the summit would make of her article in today’s Times, under the heading “How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam”.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

Surely the point of holding a Secular Islam Summit is to advance the cause of an Islamic enlightenment – to reach out to those Muslims appalled by what they see being done nowadays in the name of Islam, and who might perhaps be inspired by the example of Muslims with the courage and vision to argue that Islam can exist in a modern secular world side by side with other religions and beliefs: Muslims who “affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience”. Whether such a movement is feasible is of course open to question, but it’s not going to be helped by articles such as this, which see Islam itself as the problem. All it’ll do is antagonise the kind of Muslim it should be trying to attract.

As she outlines at the start of her article Chesler has her own reasons for believing in the “barbarity of Islam” (I wonder if that’s her title, or one that the Times imposed: whichever, it wasn’t a smart move), and much that she says is spot on, but it doesn’t seem to me to advance the cause at all. Nor do I think we in the West are in any immediate danger of being “overrun by Sharia”. Still, I suppose it’s a sign of some kind of progress that I can now read articles in the Times that I find too harsh on Islam.