Middle East Studies Online Journal

Opinion:

ACT OF RECONCILIATION: AN APOLOGY?

By: Ebrahim Moosa*

September 19, 2010

The strong opposition to the proposed Park51 Islamic Center in New York over the summer of 2010 made me ponder and think hard as to why so many Americans had serious fears and misgivings about Islam and Muslims. Continue reading MUSLIM APOLOGY? Nicholas Kristof’s column

EBRAHIM MOOSA

The gulf in perception between Islamic and secular perspectives over the meaning of human rights is growing. Media reports and western governments repeatedly charge Muslim governments from Sudan to Iran of human rights violations. In some parts of the Muslim world, a string of events indeed suggest that the violation of human rights continue with little sign of immediate abatement. Tragedy is the overriding topos of the media attention that such events receive. The list can become endless, but I will only mention a few incidents in order to highlight the salient contexts and issues for the purposes of a discussion on human rights. The Turkish Muslim feminist Konca Kuris was kidnapped by a Turkish group known as the Hizbullah in 1998 and her dead body was found in 1999.1 In 1997 Egypt’s highest court ruled that the writings of a Cairo University professor, Nasr H~mid Abã Zayd were tantamount to apostasy. 2 In 1992, Muslim militants assassinated the Egyptian human rights activist and essayist Farag Fouda. The 1980s witnessed the international imbroglio amounting to a debacle when Iran’s clergy offered a ransom to anyone who would assassinate the Indian- born British author Salman Rushdie for writing novels that offended Muslim sensibilities.
On a daily basis, spine chilling reports of death and civilian casualties perpetrated by Muslim militants and the military in Algeria bewilder observers after the army’s subversion of the democratic process in that country. In many Muslim countries like Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Tunisia, intellectuals are subjected to harassment by traditionalist and fundamentalist quarters alike as well as by governments for their critical study of religion and for opinions that do not meet with approval from the religious establishment (…) Continue reading The Dilemma of Islamic Rights Schemes