Reforming Islam From Within: Is It Happening Even Now, And Is It Under Attack By Counter-Jihadists?

Is a movement to reform Islam from within already here - something that has been devoutly hoped for - and some of us don't even know it?

On October 27, 2009, the well-known Muslim peace activist from Bangladesh, Shoaib Choudhury, arrived in New York City to give talks on the problem of jihad at several prestigious institutions in the area. Shoaib, as he likes to be called, has gained the respect of much of the world, especially among Jews, for his heroic efforts to stop the Muslim persecution of Jews and other religious minorities in Muslim countries. For this, his life has been threatened several times after he was accused of sedition, imprisoned and tortured. He still is at risk of being hanged by the state for his supposed crimes.

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Relaxing on a rainy evening after a long flight from his native Bangladesh, he met with several counter-jihad activists in midtown Manhattan. The plan was to see how mutual support and alliances could be developed.

However, that plan was aborted by the truculent attitude of some of the activists.

They tore into Mr. Choudhury as a supporter of Islamic intolerance regarding other religions, as a wife abuser who forces his spouse to veil herself, and even as a liar. None of this had any relationship to reality, but Shoaib was deemed untrustworthy by them. Why? Because he would not join the "activists" in publicly bashing Mohammed and the text of the Qu'ran.

No, he has chosen not to do that. Instead, he spends his time and uses his journalistic skills to dig out buried information about al Qaeda's infiltration of the government and schools of his country, and to publish his findings in his online journal and in his publishing house. One new piece of information, for example, is that there is wide-spread sexual abuse of children in the madrassas, resulting in an epidemic of venereal diseases among these unfortunate children.

Shoaib's goal is to expose evil to the light of day so that public outcries can bring about needed reforms. He attacks the broad central branches of self-serving and sadistic Islamic practices rather than taking an axe to what the American counter-jihadists consider to be the main problem: the trunk of the tree - that is, Islam itself.

Why does he do this? Shoaib reasons that if he were to criticize Islam per se, he would lose all credibility in the Muslim world. He would be seen as an outsider, an apostate, somebody to be automatically despised - and his voice would be lost. Since he is a native to his own country and has taken life threatening risks in it, why should he change his strategy to reflect the approach of his armchair counter-jihadist critics?

Moreover, Shoaib is not the only one disdained in this way. There are other Muslim reformers working more or less under cover to bring Islam out of its convulsive cruelty and into a calmer, more peace loving practice. In addition, there are some Muslim sects, like Sufis, Dervishes and the Ahmadiyya movement that make a point of turning their backs on all violence.

The handful of critics noted here are part of a larger problem. Many American counter-jihadists become rigid, even fundamentalist, in their thinking. They demand a kind of theological purity from those they are willing to describe as "not enemies." In a way, this is understandable, since fellow Americans not in the counter-jihad movement have proved so dense about the core issues of jihad that frustration is bound to grow. Having the deceiving phrase, "Islam is a religion of peace" bandaged over the national consciousness by presidents adds rage to the frustration.

However, giving in to that rage and frustration will not help to defeat jihad. Instead, we must be flexible and committed to finding effective ways to drive back the twin devils of obvious terrorism and stealth infiltration. If that means emphasizing concrete practices of infiltration rather than the abstract theory/theology of Islam, so be it. We may be better understood by our countrymen who have so far stayed somnolent.

Fighting jihad has two fronts. One is within the vast part of the American community that ignores and denies the stated intention of Islam to dominate the world, whether by violence or stealth jihad, as with CAIR. It is indeed extremely important that the media, the public and especially our elected officials wake up to the dangers of radical Islam instead of continuing to allow the jihadists to gain a foothold through denial of their mandates.

The other front is within the Muslim world. There actually ARE people within that broad range who are as aware of the evils of Islam as we are. At great risk to their personal safety, and sometimes losing their lives because of their efforts, they denounce the built in hatred for non-Muslims, the very idea of jihad and forced conversions, the oppression of women, and more.

Think about it. If you happened to be born into the Muslim world, would you accept it or would you seek ways to make it more humane? If you would chose the latter course, then you can recognize that there are rebels of various kinds within the Muslim world. If they chose to work within the Muslim world, and to continue to call themselves Muslim for a variety of reasons, including strategic ones, that must be taken into account.

The choir has been preached to. The job now is to spread that information to the naive AND also to support the efforts of genuine freedom fighters within the Muslim world. Just who is a genuine freedom fighter is another story and does deserve careful and skeptical thinking.

However, to dismiss out of hand the idea that there can be freedom fighters within the Muslim world is anti-empirical and a strategic dead end. If all of the 1.5 billion Muslims are assumed to be killers in waiting, then it would make sense to nuke them all. Do you think that will happen? Would you want it to?

Madeline Brooks, M.A., is the head of a counter-jihad group in New York City. She writes about jihad at www.actnycoalition.org and she writes about domestic politics under the pen name of Brenda West at http://thesilentmajority.wordpress.com.

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