I can give
you the standard line, because I’m a liberal, I’m (mostly) politically correct,
and, besides, who hasn’t heard it? So here goes:
Islam is
a religion of peace and love, there is no place either in the Quran or in the practice of the religion
for violence against women or those who do not share the faith.
Then it
goes further: Islam, unlike Christian religions, is non-hierarchical. There is
no pope, no Archbishop of Canterbury who speaks for the believers. Rather, each
Imam is the spiritual head and teacher of a mosque or university. Yes, some
mosques for historical or theological reasons are more important than others,
and thus some imams are more prominent than others, but no imam speaks for all.
How
convenient!
I say this
because the world has sat around for three weeks and watched as the Nigerian
government did nothing about getting the 276 still-missing kidnapped girls freed from their captors, members of a
group called Boko Haram. The group attacked the girls at bedtime in their
boarding school, and the scene must have been horrific. And the head of the
group issued a rambling-à la-bin-Laden speech promising to sell these girls in
the marketplace. Oh, and that’s no idle threat, since Nigeria is a major…well, here’s NBC News
on the subject:
The Global Slavery Index, an annual survey by the Australian
anti-trafficking group the Walk Free Foundation, ranks Nigeria fourth on its
list of nations with the highest number of people living in “modern slavery,”
behind India, China and Pakistan.
Right—so
all the world has to sit around and watch this atrocity, but that’s not all.
Because God forbid we should even breathe the suggestion—I’ll take a sledgehammer
to the keyboard after I write this—that there’s something more than usually
blood thirst about Islam. Readers, you’re my witnesses—I have more than once
tsk-tsked the Catholic Church, and I refuse to comment on reports that this
blog was more than a little responsible for the unprecedented resignation of Ben 16, or whatever the number was. My point?
Not too many Christians out there are carrying out attacks on girls’ schools.
Oh, and
there’s another thing. Since no one can speak for this religion, and since you,
Dear Reader, are very likely doing other things, like working to pay your bills
and raising children, then you have to assume that some imams out there are
speaking out and decrying this atrocity….
Are they?
It’s hardly
scientific, what I’m doing, but it’s more than I’ve seen anyone else do. I
googled “top imams“ and got this link from ranker.com.
Are they
really the top imams? Who knows, but I took each one of the top ten and googled
his name (a curious lack of women in the group, by the way) and the words “Boko
Haram.” And—perhaps unfairly—I gave them just one page of search, under the
assumption first that it was a fairly narrow search and, second, that it was
certainly topical.
So here it
goes:
1. Abdul Rahmen al-Sudais is described in Wikipedia thus:
Abdul
Rahman Ibn Abdul Aziz as-Sudais (Arabic: عبد الرحمن السديس (ʻAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʻAbd al-Aziz as-Sudais),
born Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1960)[1]
is the imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and was the "Islamic Personality Of the
Year" in 2005. Al-Sudais has called for efforts to combat terrorism,[2][3] preached Islam's
opposition to "explosions and terrorism",[4] and has called for
peaceful inter-faith dialogue.
OK—the
Google search turned up nothing related to Boko Haram, but did, at the bottom
of the page, have this:
Despite
his sectarian, racist incitements that Jews are “scum…rats…pigs and monkeys,”
the chief cleric of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Sudais,
has been welcomed and invited to preach at the East London mosque in
Whitechapel tonight, Tuesday evening, 4 August 2009.
Al-Sudais,
who has close ties to the Saudi elite, has also insulted Christians and Hindus,
referring disparagingly to Christians as “cross-worshippers” and Hindus as
“idol worshippers”.
He
has been banned from Canada for his anti-Semitism.
Guys? The
imam of the Grand mosque in Mecca has been banned in Canada? Not looking
good.
2. Abdul Rauf, whom you will know as the Ground
Zero imam. In fact, the
search was a bit problematic, since there are a basketball player and a
Nigerian politician with almost identical names. So I added “Imam Abdul Rauf
Boko Haram” and hit the enter button.
And I’m
pleased to tell you, the Imam has been tweeting up a storm: “Six reasons the
World Should Demand Action” he tweeted yesterday. But any public statements?
New conferences? Op-Ed pieces? No, though there was this:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf Accused of Embezzling Millions from
Mosque Fund
Right—when
a bunch of his guys abscond with over two hundred girls, what did this guy do?
He tweeted!
3. Imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen is a Danish
guy, and half of the search results were in…Danish. Right, but there didn’t
seem to be anything much in the way of denunciations on the screen, though I
dropped in on the Wikipedia
article on him, and discovered that he was convicted and sentenced to over a
year in prison for “buying and selling 5kg of hashish.” But look, he was 29 at
the time (though he had converted to Islam a year earlier….)
4. No, there’s nothing recent about this
guy from Queens—but I do give you this, from the Wikipedia article
on him….
Ahmad
Wais Afzali
(b. 1972 (age 41–42)) is an imam, formerly from Queens, New York. He was deported from the United States in
2010 as part of a plea bargain after lying to the
American FBI regarding a conversation
he had held with acquaintance Najibullah
Zazi,[1] a man later convicted of
terrorism charges in the United States.
Guys?
5. Imam Ahmed Yassin—OK, this guy was a
problem, though maybe it’s just that my brain has gotten dazed by so much
ole-time religion. The problem? I kept getting results for Sheik Ahmed Yassin,
and I didn’t think I wanted that. But I pursued the sheik, and he may be our
man. And who was he? A founder of Hamas, who died in 2004.
OK—look, I
was going to be fair. My father, I have no doubt, would have gotten all the way
down the list of the top ten imams: he would have found some imam willing to
step up to the plate and bat one for religious moderation. And in fact, I can
report that the Egyptian mufti
(and wouldn’t it be fun, by the way, to be a mufti? Just for a day or two, you
know, kind of check it out…)....
Sorry, I
was about to tell you that the mufti has come out and “slammed” Boko Haram!
Hah! Take that!
I started
out skeptical, but guess what? That’s fallen completely by the wayside!
Whew….
So, unable
to endure any more, I have called my sports consultant, who happens to be my
brother.
“Johnny,
what do you call it when one team is getting slaughtered and nobody can stand
it any more?”
“The mercy
rule.”
Mercy,
indeed!
