In the Red Zone

RUSHED TO JUDGMENT

They weren't Muslim.  As Jeane MacIntosh and Todd Venezia report in today's New York Post, the people who killed the Armanious family were two thugs with the Christian-sounding names of Hamilton Sanchez and Edward MacDonald.  This revelation comes after a steady stream of accusations that Muslims might have taken revenge on the Copts for posting internet messages critical of Islam.  In the days following the murder, understandably upset individuals leveled harsh denunciations of the religion, and threatened Muslims who attempted to show solidarity with the Armanious's friends and relatives. Even now, some people won't accept the fact that their rush to judgment was wrong.

But it was.  As prejudgment and guilt by association usually are.  True, the degree of animosity directed at Muslims was relatively low, particularly when compared to other outbreaks of xenophobia and scapegoating this nation has witnessed.  Still, for that reason alone, it's worth reminding ourselves of one of the fundamental concepts of democratic freedoms:  presumed innocence.  This means religions, too--they, no less than people, are guiltless until proved otherwise.  And if it is wrong to abandon democratic principles in the name of multicultural "tolerance." it is equally wrong to jettison those principles in moments of terror and fear.  Cultures that falter in either of these directions soon become lost.  Just ask the Dutch. 

TRIBAL ISLAM WATCH VI

Nearly eradicated, polio is on the rise again--and Muslims clerics are to blame.

Donald G. McNeil writes in the New York Times that Saudi officials discovered two cases of polio in the country this winter--a major concern since pilgrims flooding into Mecca for the hajj could take the communicable disease back to their home countries.  What makes this situation particularly tragic--and infuriating--is that one of the cases is a five year-old Nigerian boy who has lived for several years on the outskirts of Mecca.  But first, some statistics.

In 1988, polio infected people in 125 countries.  That year, world health officials dedicated themselves to eliminating the disease, and by 2003 a $3 billion vaccination effort had restricted it to six countries.  The disease, however, soon began spreading again, from an epicenter in northern Nigeria.

Why Nigeria?  Because in 2003, Muslims clerics and local politicians blocked vaccination efforts, claiming they were an American plot to sterilize Muslim women and spread AIDS (some also maintained that the vaccine contained pork products).  Last January, John Donnelly of the Boston Globe quoted a Nigerian doctor and president of the country's Supreme Council for Shari'a Law:

Just look at the Internet.  There's strong proof that the US government, dating back to 35 years ago, with Kissinger and Nixon, believed that population is the most important factor for US hegemony in the world. Since they cannot rapidly increase the US population, the only way for them to dominate is to depopulate the Third World. This is the motive, as far as we are concerned.

Donnelly also spoke to a Nigerian sheik, who denounced the genocidal objectives of the United States:

How do you deal with an enemy? Muslims, we hate America. Everything is aggravated now. How can we trust this nation, especially when it helps buy the polio vaccine and then puts drops of the vaccine into our children's mouths?

Last summer, health officials finally convinced Nigeria Muslim leaders to accept a vaccine made in Indonesia.  But the damage caused by this conspiratorial ignorance was done:  the AP reported last January that Nigeria had 763 cases of polio in 2004, versus 355 in 2003.  The story adds,

the Nigerian-rooted virus spread to neighbor countries including Benin, Chad and Cameroon. It also was exported further afield, to Botswana, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Togo and even Saudi Arabia.

Now the Times reports that the disease has also appeared in the Sudan, Pakistan, northern India, Afghanistan and Egypt--all Muslim areas.  "It's going to take months to deal with these effects," an official from the World Health Organization has said.  Indeed.  Once again the Muslim Redoubt--that intransigent grandiosity that would sacrifice the innocent on the altar of cultural purity has claimed additional victims.  Multiculturalists, self-loathing Westeners and European appeasers take note.

CREEPING JIHAD WATCH

The Dutch continue to sink into the status of dhimmi, or infidels living under Muslim occupation.  From Jihadwatch, comes this post found on Little Green Footballs:

In the Netherlands the national flag is now banned on most schools. If a student wears the national flag of his own country he will be suspended or expelled from school. The reason for this is that this provokes the immigrants (the Muslims) and therefore it is considered discrimination if you wear your country's flag in your own country. Even people who have a bumpersticker with the flag on their car are harassed and called a fascist by the Muslims. Most schools also ban certain clothing like the Lonsdale brand and combat boots with white or red laces. This is also considered a sign of racism. There are of course no restrictions for the immigrants on clothing.

Here is the original Dutch article.

On February 1, the Washington Post's Keith R. Richburg described how Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and outspoken critic of Islam, is under constant threat by Muslim extremists.

Wilders now travels everywhere with six bodyguards.  He cannot sleep in his own home, but is moved around between various undisclosed safe houses.  He sees his wife twice a week, at a safe house. 

Wilders is not the only Dutch politician targeted by radical Muslims.  Others include Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born member of parliament who collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film that cost him his life; and Ahmend Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born alderman who has committed the outrage of talking about "tolerance and the need for Muslims to adopt to the Dutch way of life."  Richburg quotes Wilders,

We are in an undeclared war.  These people are motivated by one thing:  to kill everything that we stand for.

Read the whole article here.

And then turn your attention to Nidra Poller's recent article in the New York Sun, "The Brave New World of Eurabia."  It deals with Egyptian historian Bat Ye'or's recently published Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, in addition to a report drafted under the auspices of the European Commission entitled "Dialogue Between People and Cultures in the Euro-Mediterranean Area." 

If Europeans are  indeed involved in an "undeclared war" against Islamic extremism, they are not winning.  All the vigilance and security measures in the world cannot protect them if the citizenry itself no longer accepts, obeys and defends the values inherited from their forefathers.  Meanwhile, the bien pensants and Olympian progressives of the continent scoff--and profess to fear--boorish, pugnacious, irrational American patriotism and sense of destiny.  But it is precisely our irrational will to believe in and accept--beyond all argument and "nuanced" deliberation--the greatness and universality of our values that will inoculate us from dhimmitude and creeping jihad, and prevent the Muslim Redoubt from erecting its barricades upon our shores.

TRIBAL ISLAM WATCH V

[Note:  light blogging today, as I finish an article for Harper's on Shia religious imagery.]

You can call this Democracy 101, but we are hoping it will lead to Democracy 106.

--  Saudi Arabian voter Ibrahim al-Nassar

(Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times)

As you know by now, yesterday, Our Friends the Saudis staged their first-ever democratic elections.  Well, not quite their first:  apparently, in 1925, King Abdel Aziz established a 12-member elected council in Mecca which lasted about a decade.  Hardly the irresistible march of democracy across the Hadj.  Thursday's experiment in democracy was a little more far-ranging:  male voters chose 127 men for 37 municipal councils in the Saudi capital of Riyadh; male voters will also choose in March and April 592 other men for 178 similar posts across the country.  Women, of course, are not invited.

How transformative will these elections prove for the desert kingdom?  Democracy is only as effective as the culture in which it takes place--and to give you an idea about Saudi society, and especially its treatment of women, I offer an excerpt of a letter from the Arab News:

A colleague narrated an incident witnessed by his wife, who is a doctor employed in a hospital. He said, “A citizen came to her clinic accompanied by his sick teenage daughter. My wife wanted to ask the girl about her health problem, but was surprised that whenever she asked her a question her father replied on her behalf, as if it was the father who was ill, not the daughter.”

By her father’s strange action, the sick girl was turned into a guest of honor.

He said, and this is what is strange, “Before the departure of the father and his daughter my wife wanted to encourage the girl and raise her morale, as she was ill. She told her, ‘You should take good care of yourself and study well so that some day you will become a doctor like me’.”

My colleague said that his wife was surprised that it was again the father who replied on behalf of his daughter. But his reply was stranger still. He burst into a rage, “What are you saying? This profession is not for us. It’s a shame to allow our daughters to work as doctors. Do you want my daughter to work in this dirty profession?”

I have a conviction that this man and those of his kind cannot change their calcified thinking even if we open a center for dialogue or a satellite channel in his courtyard.

The writer underscores an interesting point.  The word "dialogue" is always used--especially in the Arab world--by leaders who wish to delay or prevent practical social change in their countries with an obfuscating screen of promises, declarations and pronouncements.  In light of this, it is amusing to read Saudi official Basheer al-Gorayedh's comment in yesterday's Financial Times about US. attitudes toward OFTS:

We feel that even on an official level they don't seem to understand our perspective on things after this long friendship.  There needs to be a serious dialogue between us.

On the contrary, perhaps we understand you all too well.  And the time for "dialogue" passed at exactly 8:48 on the morning of September 11, 2001.

CREEPING JIHAD

You'd better stop this bull...or we are going to track you down like a chicken and kill you.

Two months before unknown assailants murdered Hossam Armanious, his wife and two daughters in their Jersey City, NJ, home, Armanious received the above anonymous threat (see my post "Uncivil Rites.").  According to the New York Sun's Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (scroll down), the threat came from a chat service site called PalTalk.com on which people frequently enter into debates about Islam.  Gartenstein-Ross writes authorities have discovered a website called www.barsomyat.com that "systematically tracks Christians on PalTalk"--and posts personal information, even photographs, of those who criticize Islam.  The site also "attempts to track down their addresses." 

Authorities investigating the Armanious'  murders have yet to determine if Islamic extremists are involved; nor have they found any link to barsomyat.com.  Still, Gartenstein-Ross adds, "many barsomyat.com users expressed jubilation at the deaths" of the Coptic family.

*

The New York Sun's Meghan Clyne writes that a report by a human rights's organization accuses Our Friends the Saudis of distributing Wahhabi literature in more than a dozen mosques across the U.S.  Here is an excerpt from the report:

The documents stress that when Muslims are in the lands of the unbelievers, they must behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines. Either they are there to acquire new knowledge and make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or they are there to proselytize the infidels until at least some convert to Islam. Any other reason for lingering among the unbelievers in their lands is illegitimate, and unless a Muslim leaves as quickly as possible, he or she is not a true Muslim and so too must be condemned. For example, a document in the collection for the “Immigrant Muslim” bears the words “Greetings from the Cultural Attache in Washington, D.C.” of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. In an authoritative religious voice, it gives detailed instructions on how to “hate” the Christian and Jew: Never greet them first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never imitate the infidel. Do not become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.

Read the whole thing.

*

The pull-quote of the New York Times article says it all:

Can Islamists change the Netherlands' open attitudes?

Immigrants, of course, are supposed to come to the West and gradually take on the attributes of the host country.  But what if the opposite takes place?

The article, by Marlise Simons, notes how the Netherlands' main film festival in Rotterdam canceled a showing of "Submission," the short movie made by Theo van Gogh which cost the filmmaker his life.  The film's producer "pulled the film on the advice of the police after receiving threats."

Meanwhile, a Morocco-Dutch painter has gone into hiding after an exhibition of his work, which critiqued radical clerics, opened in mid-January.  The gallery has so far refused to remove the paintings.

This is creeping jihad.  Not the bannered armies of the Amir al-Muninin sweeping from the Nadj to Andalusia, but immigrants using the freedoms granted to them by the West to deny people those same freedoms.  As I noted in "Fatwa on Wisteria Lane," radical Muslims seem intent on suppressing not only anti-Muslim expression by Muslims, but by non-Muslims, as well--and increasingly any expression they find objectionable.  Ominously, Simons writes, some Dutch

have quietly asked if self-censorship might be acceptable to keep the social peace.

No, it is not acceptable.  Radical Islam will never conquer the West in the sense of occupying our capitals with its troops.  They don't have to.  They only need to frighten us into making gradual, incremental changes---always rational, justifiable, prudent--in our own life-styles until we live on terms not set by our choosing, but theirs.  This is the Muslim Redoubt at work:  a strategy of insularity, grandiosity and aggression that refuses to adapt to the "infidel" world, even as it demands that world adapt to it.  Message to the Dutch--and all cultures faced with creeping jihad:  concession is not an option; abandonment of principles, suicide. 

THE MUSLIM REDOUBT

Cultural slavery is far more harmful than political domination.  Yet in practice, they are inseparable.

                                     -- Ibn Khaldun

Consistently brilliant, Paul Wretchard of Belmont Club was never more so when he noted on January 13 how

Middle Eastern warfare, beginning in modern times from the Franco-Algerian war in the 1960s favored a strategic withdrawal by its militarily weaker forces into social redoubts, defended not by concrete fortifications but by nearly impenetrable barriers of kinship, language and religion. America might deploy a million men to Iraq and physically control every inch of ground, but unless it could reach into this social fortress it could never successfully engage the enemy.

Bullseye, Mr. Wretchard.  Mabrook.

Today across the globe, we witness Muslims erecting "social redoubts" wherever their culture is under stress.  In places like Falluja, Samarra and Baghdad, leaders utilize the politics of grievance and the terror of assassination to prevent their followers from participating in Iraq's democratic future.  In working-class neighborhoods across Europe, first-generation immigrants and alienated Muslim youths are refusing to assimilate, even as they increasingly demand that the majority culture tolerates their beliefs--or else.  In madrases across the Middle East, students receive education in religious studies rather than science and world literature (this is a culture, let us recall, that in a millennium has translated less books into Arabic than Spain translates into Spanish each year), even as wild and irrational conspiracy theories further limit and sequester their imaginations.

"Muslims everywhere live in slavery to fundamentalist Islam," says Hasan Mahmoud, a member of the Muslim Canadian Congress.  "Their leaders force them to live in an unreal world where they are told they are the greatest nation on earth."

As Wretchard notes, the Muslim Redoubt is a deliberate--if not always articulated and conscious--strategy of non-cooperation, or as little cooperation as possible, with unbelievers.  Its enforcers are clerics, academics, politicians and family patriarchs; its ideology is fundamentalism, shari'a, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, "honor" codes and misogyny.  Its symbol is the cave, that magical space of concealment and defense, which appears in multiple forms in Islamic culture:  from the inner glories of mosques to the proverbial "hideout" of Osama bin Laden to the linen dungeons of hejab.  And its goal is to regiment, isolate and preserve the strength of Muslims for the inevitable triumph of dar-al-Islam over those who dwell in jahilliya--darkness, ignorance, sin. 

Most Muslims do not subscribe to this weaponized passive-aggressiveness--indeed, Islam's history of cultural interaction has bestowed incalculable benefits to mankind.  But we cannot ignore the spiritual introversion and defensiveness spreading across the umma.  "It is like a virus, spreading throughout world Islam, sickening and corrupting it," remarked Senad Agic, a Bornian cleric now living in Chicago.

Indeed, the main, the great exception to those who would imprison their hearts and minds in social fortresses are, of course, believers in North America.  As I talk with Muslims who are interested--indeed, desperate--to rescue their beliefs from fundamentalism and archaic tradition, I am struck by the hope they place in this continent.  Here, they tell me, the revolution will begin.  Here, amidst a confident, free, intellectually curious and spiritually adventurous Islamic community will they find their faith revitalized by the energies of modernism.  Here, as writer Irshad Manji said last fall during a talk at New York's 92nd Street Y,

at no other time can Muslims say we live in a place where we can speak freely without fear of state reprisal or torture.  I ask other Muslims, what in God's name are you doing with that freedom?

But even here, where the shining medina on the hill beckons Muslim hopes, clouds gather.  According to the great Sufi moderate Sheik Hisham al-Kabbani, 80 percent of the mosques in North America have fallen under the sway of Wahhabism, the puritanical form of Islam that is Saudi Arabia's second fossilized export to the world.  Recently, Asra Nomani, writer of Tantrika and the up-coming Standing Alone in Mecca, told me how, over the last quarter-century, she has seen American mosques change from easygoing places where men and women intermingled, to increasingly segregated and spiritually insular religious camps.  A member of the Muslim Student Association at Princeton related how the president of his organization is demanding that men and women sit separately during meetings, and is pushing for a curtain to divide the sexes. 

Worse, progressives must endure non-Muslim "allies," who, in the name of tolerance and multiculturalism refuse to criticize Islam--and even yield to its harsher, more irrational and dangerous elements.  Thus we have school textbooks that elide the concept of jihad (while slamming Israel), and national feminist organizations more concerned about Wal-Mart, silicon implants and the Bush inauguration than hejab, honor killings and the 70 percent illiteracy rate of Muslim women.  We have nine states that allow Muslims to appear veiled on their driver's license.  And most shamefully, Canada now allows shari'a courts to adjudicate certain issues between couples--a concession that outrages even Islamic groups and other Muslims.   

"When I look at shari'a law and how it treats women, I cry," confides Mahmoud.  "These are laws that men have framed for their own women, sisters, mothers.  How can men be so cruel--and with such cheerfulness?"  Even worse, he continues, is the message Canada is sending to progressive Muslims in other countries.  "Where Islamic culture is engaged in a life and death struggle against political Islam, this will demoralize the moderates, and set back their efforts.  'Look what Canada is doing,' fundamentalists will say.  'If it they accept shari'a why shouldn't the Muslim world?"

As Manji writes in The Trouble With Islam.

Non-Muslims do the world no favors by pushing the moral mute button as soon as Muslims start speaking.  Dare to ruin the moment.

Unlike an actual fortification, however, the Muslim Redoubt cannot be taken by storm:  direct assaults will only cause its battlements to grow higher, narrower, its inhabitants more prone to self-destructive behavior.  I quail when, during radio interviews for In the Red Zone, hosts jocularly refer to Islam as "the religion of hate," or callers ask me how can anyone can believe in a "terrible god like Allah."  That sort of talk only benefits fundamentalists, Muslim and Christian alike.

Nor will sentiments of "tolerance" and multi-cultural piety dissolve the Muslims' ideological ramparts:  appeasement leads only to further demands from the aggrieved, as the citizens of Amsterdam discovered to their shock. Rather, in the social struggle that confronts us, we must engage "hardened Islam" as we might an individual whose alternating projections of aggression and victimhood conceal feelings of deep inferiority co-existing with a barely-restrainable power complex.  Our approach must include, along with knowledge of Islamic and Muslim history and tradition, concepts of the fetish, the cult, psychic grandiosity and malignant narcissism. 

In short, we must balance knowledge and admiration of Islam with a clear understanding of its many weaknesses, and an unyielding commitment to our own imperfect traditions of democracy, human rights, individualism and scientific thinking.  There are allies who exist behind the walls of the Burning Crescent and the All-Seeing Eye; it is they who will open its gates to the world.  But only if they are assured that we who stand beyond the ramparts will welcome them with respect and understanding of their beliefs and an equal respect and understanding for our own.

TRIBAL ISLAM WATCH IV

From the New York Times, January 13:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- In a rare public display, the Saudi government announced on Tuesday that a religious court had sentenced 15 demonstrators, including one woman, to public lashings and prison terms for taking part in demonstrations against the government.

Read the rest--including a brief description of how, exactly, Saudi authorities regulate the whipping of malefactors--here.  Note, too, the possible Al Qaeda connection.

Reader Ron Gustavson sends in this story about yet one more indignity women must endure living under the House of Saud.  And lastly,

Tribal Christianity Watch

As most of us know, on January 7, Mississippi authorities arrested 79-year-old Edgar Ray Killen for his connection in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.  According to testimony at the time, Killen had organized a gang of Klansman who executed the three men, burying their bodies in a levy.  (The 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning" was based on this incident.)  Killen, we should note, is a preacher.  His gang of masked "insurgents" assassinated Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney for the same reason gunmen kill people in Iraq today--because the activists were attempting to spread the gospel of freedom.  Islam is not the only creed whose devotionalists are stained by the sin of tribal and religious supremacy. 

DID THE PRIEST'S WIFE CONVERT?

Last month, a religious controversy shook the Land of the Pharaohs involving what for us would be a minor, or perhaps local, matter:  the apparent conversion of a Christian woman to Islam.  But seeing that the country was Egypt and the woman was the wife of a Coptic priest, the issue led to street demonstrations, arrests, accusations of religious discrimination, the "seclusion" of the Coptic Pope and the eventual intervention of President Hosni Mubarak.  Although this story has received fairly wide coverage, it's worth re-examining, if only to see how sensitive a role religion plays in the Muslim world and the dangers--all-too-apparent in Iraq--that occur when societies divide themselves along sectarian lines. 

The problem started on November 27, when Father Joseph Moawad, living in the village of Abul-Matameer, about 90 miles north of Cairo, reported that his wife, Wafaa Constantine, 48, was missing.  At the time, Father Moawad was in Alexandria, seeking medical treatment for diabetes.  On December 1, Constantine showed up in a Cairo police station and announced that she had left home and wanted to change her religion, according to Egyptian authorities, "of her own free will and without anybody's interference."

But interference is what she got.  The police informed Constantine that she had to first consult a priest before her conversion became official.  She agreed, and on December 2, the provincial governor of Beheira--where Abul-Matameer is located-- informed the regional archbishop of her decision and that she was ready for questioning by the church.  Nevertheless, Egyptian police did not release her, claiming that her life was endangered by angered Copts.

Copts make up between five to ten percent of Egypt's population, and relations between the nation's Christian minority and Muslim majority have generally been calm.  In the December 10 edition of FrontPage magazine, however, Robert Spencer quotes a spokesman for Jubilee Campaign, a U.K.-based Christian human rights group that  "attempts to force Christians to convert to Islam in Egypt are on the increase and the methods are getting increasingly varied and well organized."  (It should be noted that under shari'a, Muslims who leave their faith are guilty of apostasy, the penalty for which is death.)

When Constantine did not show up at Abul-Matameer, many Copts grew alarmed.  Rumors spread that Muslim radicals had kidnapped and drugged the woman, forcing her to convert.  Others said she had fallen in love with a Muslim colleague at work who had convinced her the only way she could continue the affair was to embrace Islam.  Still more began talking about a "clash of religions" and airing long-standing grievances with the Egyptian government.  At the same time, more reasonable voices argued that the woman's decision was purely a personal matter.  One bishop told Cairo's Al-Ahram Weekly that it involved a "crisis in her marital life" stemming from the fact that her husband had lost both his legs to diabetes:  Egyptian law forbids divorce in cases of adultery or conversion, so Constantine may have felt that "becoming a Muslim would be the only solution."

No matter.  On December 7, 1,000 Copts gathered at the main Cairo cathedral and a riot ensued.  Stone throwers injured 21 policemen, who in turn arrested 34 people.  In the upper Egyptian village of Munqateen, clashes between Christians and Muslims in which crowds attacked Christian homes and businesses and torched police cars led to the arrest of 25.  Concerned by the rising tensions, the Coptic leader Pope Shenouda III contacted Hosni Mubarak's office to ask for the President's intervention.  Soon afterwards, the police contacted the church and informed the Copts they would present the woman for an interview the following day. 

On December 8, Constantine, under police supervision and in the care of nuns, moved to a monastery in Cairo where a committee of priests questioned her.  That day, however, Pope Shenouda went into "seclusion," declaring his intention not to resume his duties until the government resolved "problems relating to the Copts"--specifically, as one bishop told Al-Ahram, "discrimination against Copts, restrictions on church construction and the forced conversion of Christian girls." On December 14, Constantine appeared before an Egyptian prosecutor accompanied by two lawyers from the church and announced her intention to remain a Christian.

Now it was the Muslims' turn to be outraged.  Noting that the Copts had refused to let the woman leave their custody, and even gave her job in the monastery, many charged that  the church had forced her to remain a Christian.  The fact that she appeared before the prosecutor-general in the company of lawyers added fuel to their suspicions.  An Egyptian judge accused the state of violating Constantine's freedoms by holding her "captive" in the monastery.  Others accused Pope Shenouda of using Constantine's marital confusion to put pressure on the government to accede to the Copts' demands. 

If so, the Pope was at least partially successful.  On December 22, the Egyptians released 13 rioters, mainly because they were young students who needed to take their exams.  This in turn mollified the Pope, who emerged from his "seclusion" in a Cairo monastery. 

Recriminations, however, are still flying.  Al-Ahram quotes a "prominent Coptic thinker" named Rafiq Habib who criticizes the both the government and the church for their dealings over the Constantine situation.  At a time when Islamist movements threaten Egyptian society, he argued, the fact that secular authorities yielded to the Copts when they used religion to cudgel the authorities "will have dangerous repercussions"--not the least of which will be to stir up sectarian anger among Muslims.  "All should be equal before the law, without any distinction," he said.

Thus ended l'affaire Constantine.  There's no word of her reunion--if there was one--with Father Moawad, or why, exactly, she sought to convert, and then re-convert.  "I was born a Christian," she reportedly told authorities, "and I will live and die a Christian."  If nothing else, she discovered that for a priest's wife, it's difficult to do anything else. 

DAY AT THE MOSQUE

From the outside, the Westbury branch of the Islamic Society of North America is indistinguishable from other religious structures on New York's Long Island.  True, there's no cross, and the directory board at the entrance lists the times for zuhr, 'asr and maghrib--and bumper stickers affixed to the backboards of nearby basketball hoops read "NO PRAY, NO PLAY"--but in all other respects, the mosque is as much a part of the community as the Church of God Kingdom Hall down the road. 

Inside, the people are no different, either.  Well, not quite:  there's nothing like Muslim hospitality to make a stranger feel at home.  And indeed, my visit January 1 to the 20-year old mosque was made even more enjoyable by the graciousness and assistance of the director, Dr. Faroque Khan.  In addition, I was also able to meet and converse at length with the day's main speaker, Feisal Abdul Rauf, imam of New York City's al-Farah Mosque and author of What's Right with Islam.   Surrounded by this genial company, I found it hard to believe several observers, including Stephen Schwartz and Long Island Congressman Peter King have accused the mosque of serving as a hotbed of Islamic extremism. 

I'd gone to the ISNA to attend the middle day of a three-day conference dedicated to exploring issues of "moderate" or "liberal" Islam.  And indeed, the general tone of the speakers was upbeat, patriotic--a lot of talk about Muslims'  "working with America" to bridge the gap between the U.S. and the Islamic world (Dr. Khan even wore an American flag lapel pin)--and ecumenical.  Criticisms of the Bush Administration were muted--even when the subject of the Patriotic Act came up--and issues involving Israel and Iraq seemed, at least on Saturday, left blessedly outside the door. 

In fact, speakers directed their harshest comments at Islam itself.  Or rather, the treatment of women in mosques.  Many women and men questioned why the "female" section of so many masjids are cramped and uncomfortable, compared to the more spacious room given to men.  Others complained about increasing instances of domestic violence in the Muslim community, and general issues involving elitism, sexism and racism.  Still more wondered why many mosques feel the need to erect a wall that separates male and female worshipers and prevents them from seeing each other during services. 

The Westbury center has no such wall.   Still, women and men sit in segregated areas.  This gender division extends to prayers--women pray behind men (to protect their dignity, I am told, since Muslim salat calls for much prostration)--and, during lunch and dinner, eat in separate rooms.  The sisters also dress shawls, scarves, robes or loose clothing.  It struck me as peculiar that so many Muslims stressed the need for Islam to do more to accommodate female needs--yet none criticized the concept of segregation (indeed, some women  actually praised it), or addressed the demand that females must cover themselves in head-to-foot clothing. Especially since many younger sisters ditched the hejab during breaks when they went outside to chat or call up friends on cell phones.  How Islam can seriously consider reforming its doctrines when it insists on two different standards for men and women is beyond this poor kafr's powers of comprehension, at least at this point.

Still, I found it refreshing to hear Muslims take a hard look at their religion's traditions, without lapsing into the all-too-common rhetoric of victimization or blame.  It put at odds the controversial reputation of the Westbury mosque.  The fact that Imam Rauf--a man whose kind and generous spirit touched every heart in the room--agreed to speak at the center also seemed to dispel suspicious that had collected around the center. 

"We have no problems with Wahabbis in our mosque," Dr. Khan assured me.  "We do not rely on Saudi money to fund our operations."  Still, I found it interesting that the mosque's literature no longer lists the name of one of its most controversial members--Ghazi Khankan, head of the New York chapter of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, and a man who once denied that Muslims were responsible for 9-11--although he continues to serve as the center's Interfaith Director.

Kindly people, warm outward sentiments, dignified piety, admiration and distrust of America, gender segregation, women wrapped in linen bags complaining about their Muslim brothers:  Islam seems riven by contradictions.  So too the Westbury mosque.  Encouraged by the congregation's apparent struggle to formulate a new and more liberal theology--an effort no doubt duplicated in thousands of masjids throughout the world--I went downstairs to the men's room.  There I discovered a sign:  ACCORDING TO THE HADITH, WE SHOULD NOT URINATE WHILE STANDING.  When a religion feels the need to determine even that aspect of human existence (and the hadith have much more to say about such intimacies), we must wonder:  what chance does it really have to modernize?

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE WATCH

Happy Holidays from PETA

"For 249,000 lambs, eight million pigs and 750 million chickens, there will be no presents under the tree, no warm family gatherings, no happy new year," PETA TV informs the viewer, as images of cuddly--and no doubt doomed--creatures bound across the screen.  The message from the animal rights activists is, of course, to "go vegetarian" this holiday season.

Well, all right.  My own animal rights activist, Warrior Woman, tells me not to criticize PETA's position on this point, and I won't.  But I wonder, what is PETA's stance on  the Hajj?  The tenth day of the holy pilgrimage to Mecca is the Day of Sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha, one of Islam's biggest holidays.  Here, the faithful sacrifice a lamb, goat or other animal in order to commemorate Abraham's substitution of a ram for his son Isaac (or Ishmael, as some Muslims believe).  According to England's Channel Four news, Muslims during each Hajj slaughter some 700,000 sheep and 8,000 cattle or camels.  Some slaughterhouses handle 50,000 animals a day, with more than 28,000 butchers working for three days.

The religious directives for Udhiyah, or sacrifice, mandate that the minimum age for a sheep is either six months or a year old; one year for a goat, two for a cow and five for a camel (a female is prefered); no chickens or rabbits.  Muslims consider it Sunna--or in accordance with the actions of Mohammad--to keep one-third of the meat and donate one-third to the poor.  Since 1983, reports Channel Four, "the meat of 8.8 million heads of sheep, camels and cows has been distributed among the poor in Islamic countries including Bangladesh, Sudan, Senegal and Somalia."  The remaining third is given to friends and neighbors, making Eid al-Adha a joyous occasion for everyone. 

Well, almost everyone.  Zena, my Baghdadi housewife friend, was raised a Sunni in the U.K.  Whenever she or her siblings asked why their father had to slit the throat of a cute little lamb or goat, her parents answered "because Ali demands it."  Translation:  the Shia made them do it.  Said Zena, "All my life, I identified Shiism with killing little animals."  And people complain that Santa is a straight, white male who oppresses the workers.

Many Muslims decry Udhiyah and claim that neither the Koran nor the Hadiths mandate it.  In this way, they're doing more to protect animals from Islamic traditions than America's self-appointed guardians of the winged, pawed and hoofed.  Evidently, PETA feels the only animals worth activist efforts are those killed for Western holidays.  A search on their website for "Eid al-Adha" turns up only a single page on islamveg.com.  A search for "Hajj" also turns up one entry: something entitled "They Shall Not Hurt or Destroy" on a site called, ironically enough, jesusveg.com.