Washington — I am an American Muslim. I have spent my adult life teaching and advising senior military leaders in the fight against terror. Last night, as I watched representatives of the American Muslim community in San Bernardino, Calif., denounce the shooters who had just killed 14 people in their city, I recognized in their bearing and words their feelings of humiliation, horror and loyalty to the United States — alongside a great fear that a new round of Islamophobia will now follow.

I know from my own experience that more Islamophobia would be the worst outcome for American efforts to defeat the Islamic State.

As a naval officer I’ve taken an oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve trained members of the Navy SEAL teams, and my mentors include the former head of the National Rifle Association, the supreme allied commander of NATO, and the commanding general of the war in Afghanistan.

I have been deeply troubled by the anti-Muslim vitriol in our country since Islamist fanatics wreaked havoc in Paris. Fearmongers have already called for registering Muslims and closing mosques. The F.B.I. has warned Muslims about possible attacks from white supremacist militias.

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If we don’t want to play into the hands of Islamic State propaganda that America is at war with Islam, we must stand up against Islamophobia. We should separate the few extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding patriotic American Muslims by working with the moderates, not against them.

The Islamic State has little to no support in most Muslim-majority countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll after the Paris attacks. Instead, with more than 60 countries aligned against it, the Islamic State is banking on Western societies to alienate their Muslim populations to increase recruitment.

In the latest edition of the Islamic State magazine Dabiq, which glorifies the Paris attacks, a recruiter makes a telling pitch. He writes that a Muslim in the West is “a stranger amongst Christians and liberals … fornicators and sodomites … drunkards and druggies,” and must come to the Islamic State to avoid sleeping “every night with a knife or pistol … fearing an overnight or early morning raid on his home.”

The Islamic State wants every American Muslim to feel alienated. Its false utopia rests on the warped dream that the estimated three million American Muslims will believe they can no longer live, thrive and worship in peace in America. We must not let that happen, even while we remain vigilant about the few American Muslims who wish us harm.

Certainly, Islam faces a deadly cult of fanaticism, and a few American Muslims have attacked their countrymen: Colleen LaRose, Nidal Hasan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, for example. More than 250 American Muslims have joined the Islamic State, according to a report by the House Homeland Security Committee, and 68 have been indicted on charges of supporting it, according to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. According to New America Foundation data released before Wednesday’s attack in California, in 26 deadly attacks inside the United States since 9/11, Islamist extremists had killed 31 people. By comparison, right-wing groups had killed 48, the data said.

Indeed, a few American Muslim preachers stoke sectarian divisions, ignore human rights, fail to condemn female genital mutilation, look the other way when women are killed in the name of honor, and demonize gays. Like me, most American Muslims condemn such perversions of our faith.

But critics argue that Islam is against democracy, nation-states, human rights and the separation of mosque and state. There are no good Muslims, according to die-hard demagogues. The message is clear: Be an American or be a Muslim.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/dont-make-san-bernardino-a-victory-for-isis.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

posted by f.sheikh

Thinkers Forum USA is appalled and condemns the mass murder shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. Our condolences and thoughts are with the families of the victims of this senseless shooting and we pray for the speedy recovery for those that are wounded.

Thinkers Forum USA agrees with President Obama that sensible gun control is urgently needed to take the guns away from the criminals , mentally deranged and hate mongers who inflict injuries on the innocent civilians.

Fayyaz A. Sheikh

President, TFUSA

(Article on 100 anniversary of General Theory of Relativity)

Nicolaus Copernicus is famous for having suggested that the Earth moves around the sun, rather than the other way around. That’s a big deal, as it displaces the Earth from its presumed position at the center of the universe. But it’s easy for us to forget something equally amazing: the idea that the Earth can actually move at all. If anything seems like a solid foundation, it’s the Earth itself. But in our post-Copernican world, we know better.

Albert Einstein, with his general theory of relativity, took this conceptual revolution one step forward. Not only is the Earth not a fixed fulcrum around which the rest of the universe revolves, space and time themselves are not fixed and unchanging. In Einstein’s universe, space and time are absorbed into a single, four-dimensional “spacetime,” and spacetime is not solid. It twists and turns and bends in response to the motion of matter and energy. We perceive that stretching and distortion of the fabric of spacetime as the force of gravity.

The idea that space and time themselves are not immutable, but are dynamical quantities that can evolve through the history of the universe, is one of Einstein’s most dramatic legacies. It was so profound that Einstein himself had trouble accepting all the implications of the idea. When he investigated the universe as a whole in general relativity, he found that it should be expanding or contracting, not staying at a fixed size. That went contrary to his intuition, as well as to what astronomers of the time actually thought the universe was doing. When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in the 1920’s, Einstein realized that he had missed the opportunity to make one of the great predictions in the history of science.

Once space and time themselves are flexible rather than fixed, what else is left that we can say is truly constant? There is one obvious candidate, again from Einstein himself: the speed of light. According to relativity, the speed of light is an immutable feature of the universe, an unbreakable speed limit that places strict constraints on what matter and information can do.

Scientists have thought about “variable speed of light” theories, because theoretical physicists love nothing more than thinking about crazy new ideas. But letting the speed of light vary over time or space turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be very well defined. If you accept that space and time are unified into a single, four-dimensional spacetime, there needs to be a way to translate between “distances in space” and “intervals in time.” That’s inevitable, and in our world that role is filled by the speed of light. The fact that light actually travels at that speed is not the important point; what matters is that there is some way of converting length into time, and vice-versa.

‘If space and time can change, little else is sacred. Modern cosmologists like to contemplate an extreme version of this idea: a multiverse in which the very laws of physics themselves can change from place to place and time to time.’

But other so-called “constants” of nature are fair game. If Einstein’s lesson is that purportedly foundational aspects of reality like space and time are actually dynamical and evolving, it’s natural to wonder whether the numerical parameters that specify the laws of physics are similarly flexible. Could Newton’s constant, which sets the strength of gravity, or quantities like the mass of the electron, actually change with time?

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/if-space-and-time-can-change-is-anything-constant/

posted by f.sheikh

(One may not agree with some of the content, but it is worth reading analysis and opinion.) F. Sheikh

The word “takfīr” (pronounced “tuck – feer”) is one of the most fearsome words in the Islamic lexicon. Deriving from the same root as “kāfir” – infidel – it refers to the act of declaring someone who is nominally a Muslim to be an infidel. And, of course, as the whole world knows by now, a Muslim who has become an infidel is worthy of being killed as an apostate under strict Islamic law. The institution of takfir is not new in Muslim societies, but it has generally been a marginal one. Today, it is at the core of the jihadi extremism that has set the world on fire from Nigeria to India and from Peshawar to Paris. The extremists do not kill based only on takfir – the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not Muslims to begin with – but this idea is central to their ideology, which specifically targets Muslims who, in their opinion, have lost the right to live because of their infidelity. Among these are numbered the 136 innocent children gunned down in Peshawar and the soldiers of the largest army of any Muslim majority country in the world. More broadly, its remit extends to entire sects, such as the Shi’as and the Ahmadis, who have been targeted repeatedly in Pakistan.

However, another version of takfir is now afoot in the world. Call it “reverse takfir”. Unlike the militant version, it is well-intentioned and self-consciously humane, but it is also dangerous. This “benign” version of takfir is epitomized by the idea that the acts of violence being committed by self-proclaimed holier-than-thou Muslims are not the acts of “real Muslims” and do not represent “real Islam”. In effect, it declares the terrorists to be infidels! The idea is widespread, and is espoused in four different contexts: By well-meaning non-Muslims (such as Presidents Bush and Obama) seeking to avoid stereotyping and the implication of collective guilt; by ordinary Muslims wishing to dissociate themselves from the beheaders; by Muslim sectarians wishing to separate their brand of orthodoxy from that espoused by terrorists; and – most ironically – by Muslim governments and security forces seeking an “Islamic” justification for attacking extremist fellow Muslims, thus implicitly buying into the central jihadi argument of apostasy as a capital offense. The urge to do this reverse takfir is understandable and not without factual basis: Most Muslims are indeed not violent extremists who wish to kill infidels. And it does help protect innocent Muslims from backlash, which is rather important. The problem, however, is that it also feeds the narrative of denial and deniability that allows the militancy to thrive.

As with most organized religions, the foundational texts and beliefs of Islam can support both peaceful versions and violent ones. Until people recognize and admit that all of these are, in fact, “real Islam”, the issues underlying the problem of jihadi militancy cannot be addressed. If the violence is “not real Islam”, the implication is that Islam – as practiced by most Muslims – needs no reform. But that is manifestly not the case. The scourge of violence in the name of Islam will be removed only when Muslims in general come to reject all instances of violence in the name of Islam, including those that are celebrated in scripture and history. When conquerors who killed “infidels” are regarded as heroes of the faith; when the world is seen as divided into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war”; when dying for God is considered better than living for the sake of fellow humans; when non-Muslims are regarded as morally inferior; when many standard prayers end by asking God for “victory against the infidels”; and when apostasy and blasphemy are regarded as capital crimes – how can jihadi violence be seen as anything but the logical conclusion of such ideas and practices? And yet, these are all part of “mainstream” Islam – some of them derived directly from holy texts. What the extremists are doing is merely taking these ideas more literally and acting on them. The main thing separating most ordinary believing Muslims from the extremists is not so much the narrowness of belief – which they both share – but the willingness to match that belief with action. Small wonder, then, that the militants see non-violent Muslims as hypocrites, which in many ways is worse than being an infidel.

This raises a painful question: Can true Muslims only be either militants or hypocrites? Is there no other alternative? And that’s where the solution must begin. The only way to find an alternative – “third way”, so to speak – is to move away from literalism and absolute interpretations. Muslims must ask themselves why Jews don’t still stone adulterers or Christians still conduct witch burnings. They made these changes, not by rewriting holy texts, but by reinterpreting them for a different time and context. If Islam and its texts are indeed “guidance for all times” as Muslims believe, surely their interpretation must change with changing times, or they will become obsolete. What we see unfolding before us is the refusal of a whole faith to recognize the fact of such obsolescence and the need for reinterpretation, which has to be the first step on the path to reformation. And this cannot be done by outsiders preaching humanism at Muslims; it requires Muslims themselves to liberate their faith from the clutches of regressive clerics and begin viewing it more rationally. They can continue to be good Muslims and revere the unchanging words of scripture, but they cannot continue to be literalist reactionaries enforcing orthodoxy by force. That just isn’t compatible with the real world – especially the modern world. People will have to be allowed to make individual decisions with regard to their faith and live! In other words, religion will need to become a private matter, and certainly not something for the State to legislate or vigilantes to enforce.

The interesting – and tragic – fact is that this dilemma is mainly a modern one. For the first few centuries of Islam, Muslims were far less inhibited about practical reinterpretation. Indeed, much of what is regarded today as Islamic law (the shari’ah) is derived from the interpretation of holy texts by early leaders, jurists and scholars. They were certainly not liberal humanists by today’s standards, but they were eminently practical people. Over time, this practicality gradually gave way to rigidity, until the so-called “door of interpretation” was officially declared shut. Even so, Muslim rulers were seldom willing to be bound by rigid religious edicts, and significant movement continued, albeit at royal whim. Some among the royalty, such as Akbar and Dara Shikoh in India, went further, trying actively to move towards more syncretic and humanistic interpretations of Islam.

The roots of the current fundamentalism lie not so much in the early history of Islam as in its recent history of disempowerment and revivalism. As Muslim societies lost power in the face of modernity, the role of ruling elites in reinterpreting religious edicts (mainly for selfish political reasons) diminished or disappeared, and the process of reform became intertwined with Westernization and modernization. This produced various responses, two of which are especially relevant today. First, during the colonial period and immediately after, a re-emerging class of Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Jamaluddin Afghani, and later Sayyid Qutb andMawdudi, sought a revival through variations on the same theme: Creating a semi-mythological and idealized version of a glorious Muslim past where near-perfect men acted as the instruments of God’s will. And, in their own ways, all of them converged on the notion of a single, ideal Islamic state – a “house of Islam” – ruled over by the righteous. One concrete result of these neo-revivalist ideas was the creation of Pakistan as an ideological Muslim homeland, though many ultra-orthodox Muslim scholars opposed it. Another was the emergence of trans-national ideological organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e Islami. All this laid the theoretical framework for today’s trans-national militancy.

The second response was the empowerment of more fundamentalist schools of Islamic thought that already existed but had generally been held in check by Muslim rulers and societies. A fateful moment occurred when one such movement – led by the originalist cleric Ibn Abdul-Wahhab in Western Arabia – made a political alliance with a regional ruling family: The future House of Saud. Over two centuries, a nexus of mutually-influencing ultra-orthodox ideologies developed from India to Morocco, but remained largely without political or economic power. All that changed with the rise of Saudi Arabia as a rich kingdom with an interest in exporting both oil and ideology. The ideal opportunity arose – less by planning than chance – in the form of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to the revival of global Islamic zealotry as fuel for the Afghan jihad, the empowering of seminaries preaching ultra-orthodox ideologies, and the inevitable seeping of these toxins into the body politic of Muslim societies. The rest is a history that is too well-known – and painful – to repeat.

Today, the two threads generated in response to Muslim disempowerment and modernity have merged. The resulting movement has inherited the trans-national character, anti-humanist ethos and regressive ideology of its parent movements. It has also been strengthened by the strategic calculus of the Great Game that has been afoot in South and Central Asia for several decades. Some may consider it natural that the movement’s most vocal expression has occurred in Pakistan, given its founding vision. However, such an assumption would be incorrect. The areas that form Pakistan were, in fact, not very amenable a priori to an exclusivist ideology, and were pervaded by a much more syncretic and humanistic version of Islam. It took several decades and great geopolitical events – such as the Afghan jihad – to bring Pakistan to the point it is at today. All appearances notwithstanding, it is not a natural home for a militant, ahistoric ideology. Obscurantism? yes; militancy? no.

http://brownpundits.blogspot.com/2015/01/unreal-islam.html?m=1

posted by f. sheikh