Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/islam/page/3/)
Free speech, when based on religious hatred, may be detrimental to the morals of a society as a whole. And though it seems unlikely for such a negative message to produce a positive outcome, it is not impossible.
Now we are faced with the problem of so-called radicalization. How are young people from Europe and the United States indoctrinated with and by the glamor and mythology of the Islamic State and its promise of a caliphate? The way to counter the indoctrination of young Muslims is to stop associating their religion with terrorists. We ought to challenge the discourse that makes them the dangerous Other.
The media’s slow response to this tragic loss – something that would otherwise be all over the 24-hour news cycle – is a painful reminder of how racism and Islamophobia distort reporting on crimes like these.
Two weeks of Muslims being asked to condemn the terrorists, asked to condemn ISIS and Al- Qaeda, asked to prove that we stand with freedom of speech and not violence and terrorism. It’s an old, tired subject that we have literally beaten to death, yet we continue.
For those unaware, the members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are persecuted in different parts of the Islamic world for their beliefs. Many clerics in Islamic nations believe that Ahmadi Muslims are a threat to their brand of Islam because millions have joined the Community since its inception in 1889.
When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.
This morning I woke up unaware of the ordeal hundreds had endured overnight while I slept. Terrorists had entered a school in Peshawar and killed more than a hundred innocent children while my own safely dreamed in their soft beds.
Blogger Metis argues against the Time Magazine article, American Hijab: Why My Scarf is a Sociopolitical Statement, Not a Symbol of My Religiosity, and defines the hijab as a religiopolitical symbol rather than a sociopolitical one.
Thomas Friedman wrote a recent article for the New York Times in which he extensively quoted a Muslim turned Christian Arab activist, Brother Rachid. As a Muslim, I fail to understand how Rachid’s view of Islam became so skewed because the Islam I know teaches the opposite of what he describes. I belong to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community that preaches love for all, hatred for none. The Holy Quran I follow equates the killing of one person to the killing of the entire mankind (5:32). It forbids compulsion in religion and admonishes human beings from creating disorder on Earth (2:256; 7:57).
Progressive Islam is not about reforming or altering the Quran itself, but rather reforming our interpretations of it, and getting rid of the extra baggage of organized religion