Criticism of Islamism

:This article is about criticism of the Islamic political and religious movement known as Islamism
Criticism of Islamism concerns critique of those beliefs or notions ascribed to Islamism or Islamist movements. Such criticisms focus on the role of Islam in legislation or the relationship between Islamism and freedom of expression, for example.
===Limits on freedom of expression===
According to Graham Fuller, a long-time observer of Middle Eastern politics and supporter of allowing Islamists to participate in politics: "One of the most egregious and damaging roles played by some Islamist ... has been in ... ruthlessly attack[ing] and institut[ing] legal proceedings against any writings on Islam they disagree with."Fuller, (2003), p.39 
Some of the victims of Islamist enforement of orthodoxy include Ahmad Kasravi, a former cleric and important intellectual figure of 1940s Iran who was assassinated in 1946 by the Fadayan-e Islam, an Islamic militant group, on the charge of takfir.A Clarification of Questions, An Unabridged Translation of Resaleh Towzih al-Masael by Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini), Translated by J. Borujerdi, with a Foreword by Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, Westview Press/ Boulder and London c1984
Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, "a 76-year-old practicing Muslim" and theologian was hanged in a public ceremony in Khartoum, January 18, 1985, "following a hasty, ill-prepared trial." Taha had preached that of the two kinds of verses in the Qur'an - those revealed in Mecca and those revealed in Medina - the Medina verses were intended only for Muhammad's own instruction and were not eternally valid principles of Islam as those revealed earlier in Mecca were.Daniel Pipes The Rushdie Affair p.76. 
Maybe the most famous alleged apostate attacked by Islamists has been Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. He has been harassed and almost killed by assailants, stabbed in the neck. Others include novelist Salahaddin Muhsin who 
<BLOCKQUOTE> ... was sentenced to three years hard labor for writings that `offended Islam`; feminist novelist Nawal al-Sa'dawi has been repeatedly tried in court for anti-Islamic writing and her husband ordered to divorce her as a Muslim apostate, although the charges were ultimately struck down; Islamist lawyers also charged Islamic and Arabic literature professor Nasr Abu Zayd with apostasy for his writings on the background of the Qur'an, and his wife was ordered to divorce him. ..." Fuller, (2003) p.39</BLOCKQUOTE>
Egyptian author Farag Foda was assassinated on June 8, 1992 by militants of the Gamaa Islamiya Kepel, Jihad, (2002), p.287 as an example to other anti-fundamentalist intellectuals.
While the perpetrators of the killing and physical intimidation have been carried out by radical Islamists, the Islamists working within the system are not innocent. Author Gilles Kepel points out that in Egypt "Islamist moderates and the extremists [have] complemented one another's actions." The more establishmentarian "moderates" declare a modernists or secularist an apostate, the extremists then carry out the death sentence against the alleged apostate. In the case of Foda's killing, establishmentarian Sheik Mohammed al-Ghazali ("one of the most revered sheiks in the Muslim world"), testified for the defense in the trial of Foda's killers. "He announced that anyone born Muslim who militated against the sharia (as Foda had done) was guilty of the crime of apostasy, for which the punishment was death. In the absence of an Islamic state to carry out this sentence, those who assumed that responsibility were not blameworthy." Kepel, Jihad, (2002) p.287
==Emphasis on politics==
===Neglect of other issues===
Although Islamism is a movement devoted to the preeminence of Islam in all fieldsRadical Islam in Egypt and Jordan By Tal, Nachman rather than shifting its focus from belief to politics, some have suggested this is what has happened, and that "organizers, enthusiasts, and politicians," rather than those focusing on spiritually or religion, have "had the most impact" in the movement.
Other observers have remarked on the narrowness of Islamism, and its lack of interest in studying and making sense of the world in general. Habib Boulares regrets that the movement in general has "devoted little energy to constructing consistent theories"At least up to the 1970s. from Pipes, Daniel, In the Path of God c1983, p.279 and made `no contribution either to Islamic thought or spirituality`.Boulares, Habib, Islam, The Fear And The Hope, p.? Olivier Roy complains of its intellectual stagnation in that "since the founding writings of Abul Ala Maududi, Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb ... all before 1978 ... there are nothing but brochures, prayers, feeble glosses and citations of canonical authors."Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1994), p.60 
Even systematic study of human society and behavior is dismissed as un-Islamic. According to Olivier Roy: 
<BLOCKQUOTE>There is neither history, since nothing new has happened except a return to the jahiliyya of pre-Islamic times, nor anthropology, since man is simply the exercise of virtue (there is no depth psychology in Islam: sin is not an introduction to the other within), nor sociology, since segmentation is fitna, splitting of the community, and thus an attack on the divine oneness the community reflects. Anything, in fact, that differentiates is seen as a menace to the unity of the community...Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1994), p.73</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Dependence on virtue===
Roy also argues that the basic strategy of Islamism suffers from "a vicious circle": 
"[F]or the Islamists, Islamic society exists only through politics, but the political institutions function only a result of the virtue of those who run them, a virtue that can become widespread only if the society is Islamic beforehand." Thus there is "no Islamic state without virtuous Muslims, no virtuous Muslims without an Islamic state".Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1996), p.60-2, 67this criticism is seconded by Malise Ruthven, an author on Middle Eastern affairs, in his book A fury for God, New York : Granta, 2002. p.69
===Failure of Islamists in power===
The problem of dependence on personal virtue and disinterest in "building institutions" capable of handling the corruption of power and human frailty is manifest, Roy believes, in the aftermath of the victories of Islamist or Islamic movements in Islamic Republic of Iran and mujahideen Afghanistan. In both cases the heroic Islamic self-sacrifice that brought Islamic insurgents to power was followed by notably un-virtuous governance of the victorious warriors "demanding their due" in spoils and corruption.Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1996), p.66-67 Islamism did not prove immune to the foibles of "other ideologies", where the virtuous `pure` are corrupted or abandon politics to "climbers, careerists, and unscrupulous businessmen."Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1996), p.195 
Disillusionment with what he calls the "faltering ideology" of Islamists in power (Iran, Erbakan in Turkey, Sudan) or having been elected and having fought a guerilla war (Algeria), is explored by scholar Gilles Kepel.Kepel, Gilles, Jihad, Harvard University Press, (2002), p.13-4
In Iran the failure is seen not just in lack of support for Islamist government, but in the decline of the Islamic revival. "Mosques are packed" where Islamists are out of power, but "they empty out when Islamism takes power." In "Islamist Iran ... one almost never sees a person praying in the street."Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1996), p.199Iran has "the lowest mosque attendance of any Islamic country," according to Zohreh Soleimani of the BBC. children of the revolution <BR>* Iranian clergy have complained that more than 70% of the population do not perform their daily prayers and that less than 2% attend Friday mosques, according to The Economist magazine. 16, January 2003 Islamic jurists, which form a politically privileged class in Iran "were generally treated with elaborate courtesy" in the early years of the revolution. "Nowadays, clerics are sometimes insulted by schoolchildren and taxi drivers and they quite often put on normal clothes when venturing outside Qom."Who Rules Iran?, 
New York Review of Books June 27, 2002
==Emphasis on early Islam==
Some critics, such as Tunisian-born scholar Abelwahab Meddeb, have bemoaned the Islamist belief that true Islam was enforced for only a few decades of its 1400-year-long history, and this short period is what Muslims should imitate. Sayyid Qutb preached that Islam was no longer in existence and that it was "necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form,"Qutb, Milestones, p.9 and follow the example of the original "Companions of the Prophet." These companions not only cut themselves off from non-Islamic culture or learning—Greek, Roman, Persian, Christian or Jewish logic, art, poetry, etc. - but "separating [them]selves completely from [their] past life," of family and friends.Qutb, Milestones, p.16-20 
Islamist belief on what constitutes original form varies. Abul Ala Maududi indicates it was the era of the Prophet and the four rightly guided caliphs.Mawdudi, Islamic Law and Constitution, (1955), p.259 Qutb's brother Muhammad thought the only time "Islam was ... enforced in its true form" was during the reign the first two caliphs, plus three years from 717 to 720 A.D.Qutb, Muhammad, Islam the Misunderstood Religion, p.176-78 For the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini, the five-year reign of Caliph Ali was the truly Islamic era Muslims should imitate.Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, p.57
Meddeb protests that this excludes not only all non-Muslim culture, but most of Muslim history including the Golden Age of Islam: "How can one benefit from the past and the present if one comes to the conclusion that the only Islam that conforms to the sovereignty of God is that of Medina the first four caliphs? ... Can one still ... love and respond to the beauties handed down by the many peoples of Islam through the variety of their historic contribution?"Meddeb, The Malady of Islam, (2003), p.104 He also questions the perfection of the early era where "three of the first four caliphs ... were assassinated," while "enmities" and "factional disputes concerning legitimacy" were played out, and points out the celebration of rightly guided originated a century later with Ibn Hanbal.Meddeb, The Malady of Islam, (2003), p.44
==Unification of religion and state==
One of the most commonly quoted slogans in the movement is that of the Muslim Brotherhood: `al-islam dinun was dawlatun` (Islam is a religion and a state). But, as one critic complains, the slogan "is neither a verse of the Qur'an nor a quote from a hadith but a 19th century political slogan popularised by the Salafi movement that emerged in opposition to Western influence in Egypt." Halliday, 100 Myths, 2005, p.85-6 19th century political origin not being a disqualification in the eyes of many other ideologies, but is a severe handicap for a belief system predicated on following the scripture revealed in, and the ways of those who lived in, the 7th century.
===Historical context===
Critics contend the idea that religion and state should be unified is not unique to Islam but to the premodern era, or at least the era around the time of Muhammad.
According to Reza Aslan: 
<BLOCKQUOTE>This was also an era in which religion and the state were one unified entity. ... no Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, or Muslim of this time would have considered his or her religion to be rooted in the personal confessional experiences of individuals. ... Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity ... your religion was your citizenship. 
The post-Julian Roman Empire was Christian, with one "officially sanctioned and legally enforced version" of (Nicene) Christianity. The Sassanid Empirein Persia was Zoroastrian, again with one officially sanctioned and legally enforced version of Zoroastrianism. On the Indian subcontinent, Vaisnava kingdoms (devotees of Vishnu and his incarnations) fought with Savia kingdoms (devotees of Shiva) for territorial control. In China, Buddhist rulers fought Taoist rulers for political ascendancy. "Thus every religion was a `religion of the sword.`" Aslan, No God But God, 2005, p.80
</BLOCKQUOTE> 
===Historical necessity===
Aside from what other religions and empires were doing at the time, the location of Muslims in the stateless world of Arab society meant they needed a state to protect themselves.
Christianity was based within the "massive and enduring" Roman Empire. The Hebrews had "ethnic bonds before becoming Jews." But unlike these other Abrahamic religions, "the Muslims depended on their religion to provide them with an authority and an identity." Pipes, In the Path of God, (1983), p.43 
<BLOCKQUOTE> 
Mohammad founded a religious community ex nihilo. He lived in western Arabia, a stateless region where tribal affiliations dominated all of public life. A tribe protected its members (by threatening to take revenge for them), and it provided social bonds, economic opportunities, as well as political enfranchisement. An individual lacking tribal ties had no standing: he could be robbed, raped, and killed with impunity. If Muhammad was to attract tribesmen to join his movement, he had to provide them with an affiliation no less powerful than the tribe they had left behind".Pipes, In the Path of God, (1983), p.42</BLOCKQUOTE> 
For these critics, religion and state can be separated without betrayal of the timeless essence of Islam.
==Islamist interpretation of Sharia==
Criticisms of Sharia law - or orthodox sharia lawIn this context "Sharia" is defined as God's law, full stop. "Orthodox Sharia law" is defined as the traditional interpretation of it which some Muslims may not agree is God's law. - are varied and not always in agreement. They include: that Islamist leaders are often ignorant of Islamic law, the Islamist definition of Sharia is in error, its implementation is impractical, and that flexible solutions have been ignored, that its scriptural basis has been corrupted, and that its enforcement is un-Islamic.
===Ignorance===
Despite the great importance Islamists gave to strict adherence to Sharia, many were not trained jurists. Islamic scholar and moderate abou el Fadl complains that "neither Qutb nor Mawdudi were trained jurists, and their knowledge of the Islamic jurisprudential tradition was minimal. Nevertheless, like `Abd al-Wahhad, Mawdudi and Qutb imagined Islamic law to be a set of clear cut, inflexible and rigid positive commands that covered and regulated every aspect of life." abou el Fadl, Great Theft, Harper San Francisco, 2005, p.82 
According to Dale C. Eikmeier, points out the "questionable religious credentials" of many Islamist theorists, or "Qutbists," which can be a "means to discredit them and their message": 
<BLOCKQUOTE>With the exception of Abul Ala Maududi and Abdullah Azzam, none of Qutbism’s main theoreticians trained at Islam’s recognized centers of learning. Although a devout Muslim, Hassan al Banna was a teacher and community activist. Sayyid Qutb was a literary critic. Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj was an electrician. Ayman al-Zawahiri is a physician. Osama bin Laden trained to be a businessman.Qutbism: An Ideology of Islamic-Fascism DALE C. EIKMEIER From Parameters, Spring 2007, pp. 85-98.</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Sharia as single universal set of laws to obey===
Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini have argued that Islam cannot be Islam without the application of Sharia law. According to Qutb, "The Muslim community with these characteristics vanished at the moment the laws of God [i.e. Sharia] became suspended on earth." Qutb, Milestones,p.9 
Khomeini preaches: 
<BLOCKQUOTE>in Islam the legislative power and competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power. No one has the right to legislate and no law may be executed except the law of the Divine Legislator.Islamic Government by Ayatollah Khomeini, 1970; p.55 of Islam and Revolution : Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, (1982)</BLOCKQUOTE> 
The argument against Islamist like Khomeini and Qutb made by these alleged hypocrites and apostates is that in the Quran itself the word Sharia means way or path and seems to deny there is one sharia for everyone to obey: 
<BLOCKQUOTE>`We gave you one religion, but We gave every one of you his own Shari'a. </BLOCKQUOTE> 
According to these dissenters the definition of Sharia as being the body of Muslim jurisprudence, its various commentaries and interpretations, only came later in Islamic history. Many modernists argue this jurisprudence is "entirely man-made, written by Muslim scholars according to their various schools, based on their best understanding of how the Qur'an should be translated into codes of law." see Muhammad Sa`id `Ashmawi; Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Against Islamic Extremism: The Writings of Muhammad Sa'id al-Ashmawy, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1998) for "one incisive, yet controversial discussion of this issue." 
One scholar, Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawi a specialist in comparative and Islamic law at Cairo University, argues that the term Sharia, as used in the Qur'an, refers not to legal rules but rather to "the path of Islam consisting of three streams: 1)worship, 2) ethical code, and 3)social intercourse.`Ashmawi, Against Islamic Extremism, (1998), p.l91 Thus al-`Ashmawi and many other modernists insist that the Shari'a is very different than Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and that fiqh must be reinterpreted anew by scholars in every age in accordance with their understanding." 
"In Turkey, the Islamist [or post-Islamist] AK party has many members who speak of Sharia as a metaphor for a moral society." Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, (2003) p.57 
Thus "there is no one Sharia but rather many different, even contesting ways to build a legal structure in accordance with God's vision for mankind." Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, (2003) p.56-7 
One difference between this interpretation and the orthodox Sharia is in the penalty for apostasy from Islam. Non-Islamist Sudanese cleric Abdullah Ahmad an-Na'im states: ".... This aspect of sharia is fundamentally inconsistent with the numerous provisions of the Quran and Sunna which enjoin freedom of religion and expression." Abdullah Ahmad an-Na'im, "Shari'a and Basic Human Rights Concerns", in Kurzman, Charles, Liberal Islam, Oxford University Press, 1996, p.5-6
===Historical record===
Another (unrelated) complaint against a revival of Sharia law is that strict application of orthodox Sharia law has been tried repeatedly throughout Islamic history and always found to be impractical.
Daniel Pipes says "the historical record shows that every effort in modern times to apply the Shari`a in its entirety - such as those made in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Libya, Iran, and Pakistan - ended up disappointing the fundamentalists, for realities eventually had to be accommodated. Every government devoted to full implementation finds this an impossible assignment." Pipes, Daniel, In the Path of God, (1983) p.135
Olivier Roy refers to the call to enforce Sharia, as a periodic cycle of Islamic history "as old as Islam itself." But one that is "still new because it has never been fulfilled. It is a tendency that is forever setting the reformer, the censor, and tribunal against the corruption of the times and of sovereigns, against foreign influence, political opportunism, moral laxity, and the forgetting of sacred texts."Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, (1994), p.4)
Leading Islamists, in contrast, maintain that in addition to being divine, Sharia (or again orthodox Sharia), is easy to implement. Qutb believed that Sharia would be no problem to implement because there is "no vagueness or looseness" in its provisions.Qutb, Milestones, p.85 
Khomeini contended 
<BLOCKQUOTE>Islam has made the necessary provision; and if laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need for you, after establishing a government, to sit down and draw up laws, or, like rulers who worship foreigners and are infatuated with the west, run after others to borrow their laws. Everything is ready and waiting.Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, p.137-8</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Quran as Constitution===
"The Quran is our Constitution" or "the Quran is our law,"Muslim BrotherhoodConstitution of Saudi Arabia "The Quran is supposed to be the supreme law of the land ..."King Faisal of Saudi Arabia speaking in 1966 about whether the KSA would adopt a constitution: "Constitution? What for? The Koran is the oldest and most efficient constitution in the world." 
from: Political Power and the Saudi State by Ghassane Salameh footnote page 7, which in turn is from Le Monde, June 24, 1966 is "the slogan encountered from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the Afghan Islamists."Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1998), p.42 But non-Islamist criticism replies that only 245 of the 6000 verses in the Quran concern legislation, and only 90 of those concern constitutional, civil, financial or economic matters. Scarcely enough to form a constitution."Islam - Society and Change" by al-Sadiq al-Mahdi from Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito, (1983), p.233 
===Ignoring Maslaha===
A solution to this problem embraced by modernists and usually ignored by Islamists, is the inclusion of the principle that Islamic law must serve the general common good or maslaha. This open-ended requirement clashes with Qutb's idea that there is "no vagueness or looseness" in Sharia, or 
"Many modernist use as the point of departure the well-established Islamic concept of maslaha (the public interest or common good.) For those schools that place priority on the role of maslaha in Islamic thinking, Islam by definition serves the common good; therefore, if a given policy or position demonstrably does not serve the public interest it simply is `not Islam`. This formulation is used by the huge Muhammadiya movement in Indonesia, among others. The pioneering Egyptian Islamic thinker Muhammad `Abdu spoke in similar terms when he criticized Muslim neglect of the concept of `common good` and rulers' emphasis on obedience above justice." Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton University Press, 1996, p.34
Ibn Aqil on how just Islamic law may consider the welfare of defendants going beyond what is "explicitly supported" by the Quran.
<BLOCKQUOTE>Islam approves of all policy which creates good and eradicates evil even when it is not based on any revelation. That is how the Companions of the Prophet understood Islam. Abu Bakr, for example, appointed Umar to succeed him without precedent. Umar suspended the Quranically mandated punishment of hand amputation during a famine, he suspended it also when he discovered that two thieves, the employees of Hatib, were under-paid. And so on."Islam - Society and Change" by al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, from Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito, 1983 p.234</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Compulsion in Sharia===
Islamist governments such as Iran's have emphasized compulsion in personal behavior (such as the wearing of hijab) enforced with religious police. The question here is that since compelling people to obey Shariah law means they may be obeying out of fear of punishment by men rather than devotion to God's law, might this not negates the merit of the act in the eyes of God. Compulsion in religious observance deprives "the observant of the credit for following God's order through personal volition. Only free acts of piety and worship have merit in God's eyes." Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, (2003) p.64 
===Ignoring problems with the development of orthodox Sharia===
Finally there is the question of accuracy of the ahadith or sayings of the Prophet which forms that basis of most of the Sharia law. The sayings were not written down for some generations but transmitted orally. An elaborate method has been developed to verify and rate hadith according to levels of authenticity, including isnad or chains of the hadith's trasmision. Nonetheless these were often not essential elements "in the dissemination of a hadith ... before the 9th century, when the collections were completed. Joseph Schacht's extensive research on the development of the Shariah has shown how quite a large number of widely acknowledged hadith had their chain of transmission added conjecturally so as to make them appear more authentic. Hence Schacht's maxim: `the more perfect the isnad, the later the tradition.`" Schacht, Joseph, 1902-1969. The origins of Muhammadan jurisprudence,Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950. quoted in Aslan, (2005), p.163 
Aside from these doubts of ahadith, orthodox and Islamist teachers ignore the history of the development of Islamic jurisprudence over centuries maintaining that "Islamic law has not come into being the way conventional law has." It did not begin "with a few rules that gradually multiplied or with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time."unnamed teacher quoted by Aslan in Aslan, (2005), p.167 When in fact, according to Aslan, "that is exactly how the Shariah developed: `with rudimentary concepts refined by cultural process with the passage of time.' This was a process influenced not only by local cultural practices but by both Talmudic and Roman law. ... the sources from which these [early schools of law] formed their traditions, especially ijma, allowed for the evolution of thought. For this reason, their opinions of the Ulama ... were constantly adapting to contemporary situations, and the law itself was continually reinterpreted and reapplied as necessary." Aslan, (2005), p.167 
In the mean time at madrassas in the Muslim world, thousands of "young Muslims are indoctrinated in a revival of Traditionalist orthodoxy especially with regard to the static, literalist interpretation of the Quran and the divine, infallible nature of the Shariah." 
====Case of hijab====
Hijab, or covering of a woman's head and body, is arguably "the most distinctive emblem of Islam".Aslan, (2005), p.65 Compulsory wearing of the hijab is also a hallmark of Islamist states such as Iran and famously the Taliban Afghanistan. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Prosecutor-General, Abolfazl Musavi-Tabrizi has been quoted as saying: "Any one who rejects the principle of hijab in Iran is an apostate and the punishment for an apostate under Islamic law is death" (August 15, 1991).Dress Code The Taliban's Islamic Emirate required women to cover not only their head but their face as well, because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption" for men not related to them.M. J. Gohari (2000). The Taliban: Ascent to Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 108-110. The burqa Afghan women were required to wear in public was the most drastic form of hijab with very limited vision. Both states claim(ed) they are (were) simply enforcing Sharia law.
True terror has reportedly been used to enforce hijab "in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan," according to a Rand Corporation commentary by Cheryl Benard. "[H]undreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed," for failure to wear hijab.Commentary. "French Tussle Over Muslim Head Scarf is Positive Push for Women's Rights" by Cheryl Benard An example being use of acid against women by Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the 1970s,
and a 2001 "acid attack on four young Muslim women in Srinagar ... by an unknown militant outfit, and the swift compliance by women of all ages on the issue of wearing the chadar (head-dress) in public." The Pioneer, August 14, 2001, "Acid test in the face of acid attacks" Sandhya Jain Kashmir women face threat of acid attacks from militants, Independent, The (London), Aug 30, 2001 by Peter Popham in Delhi 10 August, 2001, Kashmir women face acid attacks 
Islamists in other countries have been accused of attacking or threatening to attack the faces of women in an effort to intimidate them from wearing of makeup or allegedly immodest dress.Molavi, Afshini The Soul of Iran, Norton, (2005), p.152: Following the mandating of the covering of hair by women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a hijab-less woman `was shopping. A bearded young man approached me. He said he would throw acid on my face if I did not comply with the rules."
In 2006, a group in Gaza calling itself "Just Swords of Islam" is reported to have claimed it threw acid at the face of a young woman who was dressed "immodestly," and warned other women in Gaza that they must wear hijab. Dec 2, 2006 Gaza women warned of immodesty 
Iranian journalist Amir Taheri tells of an 18-year-old college student at the American University in Beirut who on the eve of `Ashura in 1985 "was surrounded and attacked by a group of youths -- all members of Hezb-Allah, the Party of Allah. They objected to the `lax way` in which they thought she was dressed, and accused her of `insulting the blood of the martyrs` by not having her hair fully covered. Then one of the youths threw `a burning liquid` on her face." According to Taheri, "scores -- some say hundreds -- of women ... in Baalbek, in Beirut, in southern Lebanon and in many other Muslim cities from Tunis to Kuala Lumpur," were attacked in a similar manner from 1980 to 1986. Taheri, Amir, Holy Terror : the Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism, Adler & Adler, 1987, p.12
But according to some critics there is a real question as to the scriptural or historical basis of this basic issue of Muslim women's lives. Such critics claim that the veil predates the revelation of the Quran as it "was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syria and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status. After all, only a woman who need not work in the fields could afford to remain secluded and veiled. ... In the Muslim community "there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E."
====Case of ridda====
Traditionally ridda, or converting from Islam to another religion is a capital crime in Islam. While this has been a mainstream, not just Islamist, belief, Islamists have been noted for their enthusiasm in enforcing the penalty. But like hijab however, there is question over the scriptural or historical basis of the proscribed sentence of death. According to reformist author Reza Aslan, belief in the death sentence for apostates originated with early Caliph Abu Bakr's "war against tribes that had annulled their oath of allegiance to the Prophet." The war was to "prevent Muhammad's community from dissolving back into the old tribal system," but was a political and not a religious war. "Still, the Riddah Wars did have the regrettable consequence of permanently associating apostasy (denying one's faith) with treason (denying the central authority of the Caliph)," which made apostasy "a capital crime in Islam."Aslan, (2005), p.119
==Innovations to Islam==
Islamists and Islamic revivalists have strived to eliminate Western practices in their lives - the use of toothbrushes, mixing of the sexes, women walking about with uncovered heads, Saturday-Sunday weekend days off, applause of speakersAbou al-Fadl, Great Theft, (2004), p.172-4Roy, Failure of Islamism, (1994), p.82 - but according to Daniel Pipes, "even in rejecting the West, they accept it," and introduce Western-style innovations to Islam.The Western Mind of Radical Islam by Daniel Pipes First Things, December 1995
===Tendency towards modernism===
Critics have noted that Islamists have claimed to uphold eternal religious/political principles but sometimes changing with the times, for example embracing "far more modern and egalitarian" intrepretations of social justice - including socialist ideas - than the rightly guided caliphs would ever have conceived of.Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, (2003) p.26 
Islamists in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran, have had to "quietly put aside" traditional Islamic divorce and inheritance law and replace them with statutes addressing "contemporary Iranian social needs," according to Graham Fuller.Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, (2003) p.30 Another critic, Asghar Schirazi, has followed the progress of changes in divorce law in Iran, starting with the western innovation of court divorce for women — a deviation from traditional Islamic Talaq divorce introduced before the Islamic Revolution. Court divorce went from being denounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1960s as the product of orders by "agents of foreign powers for the purpose of annihilating Islam," to the law of the land in the Islamic Republic by 1992.Schirazi, Asghar, Constitution of Iran, I. B. Tauris (1998) p.219 
Banning Women's Right to Divorce in Court Other loosening of prohibitions on previously unIslamic activity in the Islamic Republic include allowing the broadcast of music,Banning Music and family planning.The Fall and Rise of Family Planning
===Church-like structures===
"Traditional Islam was characterized by informal organizations. Virtually every major decision - establishing a canonical text of the Qur'an, excluding philosophical inquiry, or choosing which religious scholars to heed - was reached in an unstructured and consensual way."
Islamists, "ignorant of this legacy, have set up church-like structures." 
<BLOCKQUOTE>A number of religious functionaries have come into being whose posts were previously unheard of, for example: the Secretary of the Muslim World League, the Secretary General of the Islamic Conference, the Rector of the Islamic University in Medina, and so [on] and so forth. For the first time in history the imam of the Ka'ba has been sent on tour of foreign countries as if he were an Apostolic Nuntius.Detlev H. Khalid [Khalid Durán], "The Phenomenon of Re-Islamization," Aussenpolitik, 29 (1978): 448-49</BLOCKQUOTE>
The most extreme form of this adoption of church-like behavior is found in the Islamic Republic of Iran were the state demand for obedience to the fatawa of supreme cleric Khomeini strongly resembled the doctrine of Papal infallibility of the Roman Catholic Church, and where the demotion of a rival of Khomeini, Ayatollah Muhammad Kazim Shari`atmadari (d. 1986), resembled "defrocking" and "excommunicating," despite the fact that "no machinery for this has ever existed in Islam."
<BLOCKQUOTE>Other trends, such as centralized control over budgets, appointments to the professoriate, curricula in the seminaries, the creation of religious militias, monopolizing the representation of interests, and mounting a Kulturkampf in the realm of the arts, the family, and other social issues tell of the growing tendency to create an "Islamic episcopacy" in Iran.Shahrough Akhavi, "`Ulama': Shi`i `Ulama'," in John L. Esposito, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), vol. 4, p. 263.</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Friday as Sabbath===
"Traditionally, Friday was a day of congregating for prayer, not a day of rest. Indeed, the whole idea of sabbath is alien to the vehemently monotheistic spirit of Islam, which deems the notion of God needing a day of rest falsely anthropomorphic. Instead, the Qur'an (62:9-10) instructs Muslims to `leave off business` only while praying; once finished, they should `disperse through the land and seek God's bounty` - in other words, engage in commerce.
"Christian imperialists imposed Sunday as the weekly day of rest throughout their colonies, ... Recently, as the Sunday sabbath came to be seen as too Western, Muslim rulers asserted their Islamic identities by instituting Friday as the day off." This contradiction was recognized by some Islamists. Omar Bakri Muhammad, qadi of the so-called Shari'ah Court of the United Kingdom protested: "Unfortunately, some Muslims have become consumers of the western culture to the extent that many Muslims celebrate and wrongly take the day of Friday as a weekly holiday in contrast to Saturday of the Jews and Sunday of the Christians. Whereas the idea of a holiday does not exist in Islam and contradicts with the Islamic culture." decision dated 20 December 1999 
===Western political concepts===
One critic has compiled a list of concepts borrowed from the West and alien to the Sharia used in the constitution of Islamic Republic of Iran: 'sovereignty of the people` (hakemiyat-e melli), 'nation' (mellat), 'the rights of the nation' (hoquq-e mellat), 'the legislature' (qovveh-e moqannaneb), 'the judiciary' (qovveh-e qaza'iyeh), 'parliament' (majles [majlis of course is Arabic but the concept of a parliament is not]), 'republic' (jomhuri), 'consultation of the people' (hameh-porsi), 'elections' (entekhabat).Schirazi, The Constitution of Iran, (1997) p.18 
===Idea of historical progress===
The western idea of progress is alien to traditional Islam which saw the era of Muhammad as the best, and the world since as either static or "in decline". In this world view, "there is no place for development, progress or social advancement and improvement."W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1988), p.3 In contrast Sayyid Qutb, adopted the "Marxist notion of stages of history", with the demise of capitalism and its replacement with communism, but then adding yet another stage, the ultimate Islamic triumph. Islam would replace communism after hunamity realized communism could not fulfill its spiritual needs, and Islam was "the only candidate for the leadership of humanity." Walid Mahmoud Abdelnasser, The Islamic Movement in Egypt: Perceptions of International Relations, 1967-81, London: Kegan Paul International, 1994, p. 173.
===Feminism===
Traditional Muslim men had nothing to say about "the freedom and independence of their women" or how women were or should be equal to men. Traditional sayings had it that "the best mosque for women is the inner part of the house," and ideally a woman should leave her home only three times: "when she is born, when she is married, and when she goes to the cemetery." Abbassi Madani in 1989. quoted in Inside the Arab World, by Michael Field, 1994, p.142 A woman's veil served primarily to help her retain her virtue and prevent men from "uncontrollable (and therefore destructive) sexuality." 
For Islamists women's condition under Islam is a major issue. Women regularly attend public mosque salah services and new mosques consequently allot far more space to women's sections. 
But in explaining Islam's or Islamism's superiority in its treatment of women, many Islamists take positions unknown to the early Muslims they seek to emulate. Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna believed "Muslim women have been free and independent for fifteen centuries. Why should we follow the example of Western women, so dependent on their husbands in material matters?"Corriere della Sera, 29 August 1994 A president of the Islamic Republic of Iran boasted that "under the Islamic Republic, women have full rights to participate in social, cultural, and political activities;""An Interview with Iranian President Khatami," Middle East Insight, November-December 1997, p. 31 as did Islamist Hasan at-Turabi, the former leader of Sudan: "Today in Sudan, women are in the army, in the police, in the ministries, everywhere, on the same footing as men." Turabi explains that "a woman who is not veiled is not the equal of men. She is not looked on as one would look on a man. She is looked at to see if she is beautiful, if she is desirable. When she is veiled, she is considered a human being, not an object of pleasure, not an erotic image."Le Figaro, 15 April 1995
===Ideology===
Traditional Islam emphasized man's relation with God and living by Sharia, but not the state "which meant almost nothing to them but trouble ... taxes, conscription, corvée labor." Islamists and revivalists embrace the state, in statements like: Islam "is rich with instructions for ruling a state, running an economy, establishing social links and relationships among the people and instructions for running a family,"IRI Supreme Leader Khamene'i on Iran Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 7 June 1995 and "Islam is not precepts or worship, but a system of government."Usama al-Baz, The Washington Times National Weekly Edition, 24–30 April 1995
Rather than comparing their movement against other religions, Islamists are prone to say "We are not socialist, we are not capitalist, we are Islamic."Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia in The New York Times, 28 March 1980
In his famous 1988 appeal to Gorbachev to replace Communism with Islam, Imam Khomeini talks about the need for a "real belief in God" and the danger of materialism, but says nothing about the five pillars, does not mention the Prophet Muhammad or monotheism. What he does talk about is that "nowadays Marxism in his economic and social approaches, is facing the blind alley" and that "the Islamic Republic of Iran can easily supply the solution the believing vacuum of your country". Materialism is mentioned in the context of "materialistic ideology." 
Imam Khomeini’s message to Gorbachev 
===Innovation in Sharia===
Traditionally Sharia law was elaborated by independent jurist scholars, had precedence over state interests, and was applied to people rather than territories. "[T]he caliph, though otherwise the absolute chief of the community of Muslims, had not the right to legislate but only to make administrative regulations with the limits laid down by the sacred Law."Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 53. Those "administrative regulations" in fact amounted to a great deal of law.
Islamists in Iran and Sudan extended the purview of Sharia but gave the state, not independent jurists, authority over it. The most extreme example of this was the Ayatollah Khomeini's declaration in 1988 that "the government is authorized unilaterally to abolish its lawful accords with the people and ... to prevent any matter, be it spiritual or material, that poses a threat to its interests." Which meant that, "for Islam, the requirements of government supersede every tenet, including even those of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca."Keyhan, January 8, 1988. Nor was this Khomeini's only pronouncement along these lines. For example, shortly after coming to power, he announced that "to serve the nation is to serve God" (Radio Tehran, 3 November 1979). Something not even Ataturk, the most committed Muslim secularist, dared to do.
Traditionally Sharia applied to people rather than territories - Muslims were to obey wherever they were, non-Muslims were exempt. The idea that law was based on jurisdictions - with towns, states, counties each having their own laws - was a European import. "Turabi declares that Islam `accepts territory as the basis of jurisdiction.`Quoted in Judith Miller, "Faces of Fundamentalism: Hassan al-Turabi and Muhammed Fadlallah," Foreign Affairs, November/December 1994, p. 132 As a result, national differences have emerged. The Libyan government lashes all adulterers. Pakistan lashes unmarried offenders and stones married ones. The Sudan imprisons some and hangs others. Iran has even more punishments, including head shaving and a year's banishment.Ann Mayer, "The Shari`ah: A Methodology or a Body of Substantive Rules?" in Nicholas Heer, ed., Islamic Law and Jurisprudence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), p. 193. In the hands of fundamentalists, the Shari`a becomes just a variant of Western, territorial law." 
Under the new Islamist interpretation, the "millennium-old exclusion" of non-Muslims "from the Sharia is over." Umar Abd ar-Rahman, the blind sheikh, "is adamant on this subject: `it is very well known that no minority in any country has its own laws.`The New Yorker, 12 April 1993 Abd al-`Aziz ibn Baz, the Saudi religious leader, calls on non-Muslims to fast during Ramadan. In Iran, [non-Muslim] foreign women may not wear nail polish - on the grounds that this leaves them unclean for (Islamic) prayer. ... A fundamentalist party in Malaysia wants to regulate how much time unrelated [non-Muslim] Chinese men and women may spend alone together." 
==Islamic economics==
Criticism of Islamist (or Islamic) economics have been particularly contemptuous, alleging that effort of "incoherence, incompleteness, impracticality, and irrelevance;" Sohrab Behada, "Property Rights in Contemporary Islamic Economic Thought, Review of Social Economy, Summer 1989 v.47, (pp.185-211)Kuran, "The Economic Impact of Islamic Fundamentalism," in Marty and Appleby Fundamentalisms and the State, U of Chicago Press, 1993, p.302-41 driven by "cultural identity" rather than problem solving."The Discontents of Islamic Economic Mortality" by Timur Kuran, American Economic Review, 1996, p.438-442 Another source has dismissed it as "a hodgepodge of populist and socialist ideas," in theory and "nothing more than inefficient state control of the economy and some almost equally ineffective redistribution policies," in practice.Halliday, 100 Myths about the Middle East, (2005) p.89 
<BLOCKQUOTE>In a political and regional context where Islamist and ulema claim to have an opinion about everything, it is striking how little they have to say about this most central of human activities, beyond repetitious pieties about how their model is neither capitalist nor socialist. </BLOCKQUOTE>
===Riba===
One complaint comes from Pakistan were Islamization, includes banning of interest on loans or riba, got underway with military ruler General Zia al-Haq (1977-1988), a supporter of "Islamic resurgence" who pledged to eliminate `the curse of interest.` One critic of this attempt, Kemal A. Faruki, complained that (at least in their initial attempts) Islamizers wasted much effort on "learned discussions on riba" and ... doubtful distinctions between `interest` and `guaranteed profits,` etc." in Western-style banks, "while turning a blind eye" to a far more serious problem outside of the formal, Western-style banking system:
<BLOCKQUOTE>usury perpetrated on the illiterate and the poor by soodkhuris (lit. `devourers of usury`). These officially registered moneylenders under the Moneylenders Act are permitted to lend at not more than 1% below the State Bank rate. In fact they are Mafia-like individuals who charge interest as high as 60% per annum collected ruthlessly in monthly installments and refuse to accept repayment of the principal sum indefinitely. Their tactics include intimidation and force.
"The Islamic Resurgence: Prospects and Implications" by Kemal A. Faruki, from Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. by John L. Esposito, 1983, p.289</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Social justice===
On the same note, another critic has attacked Islamist organizations in that country for silence about "any kind of genuine social or economic revolution, except to urge, appropriately, that laws, including taxation, be universally applied." In the strongly Islamic country of Pakistan for example, this despite the fact that "social injustice is rampant, extreme poverty exists, and a feudal political and social order are deeply rooted from eras preceding the country's founding." Fuller, Future of Political Islam (2003), p.26 This lack of interest is not unique to Pakistan. "The great questions of gross maldistribution of economic benefits, huge disparities in income, and feudal systems of landholding and human control remain largely outside the Islamist critique." Fuller, Future of Political Islam (2003), p.196
==Enmity towards the West==
Major Islamist figures such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah Khomeini emphasize antipathy towards non-Muslims and anything un-Islamic. Sayyid Qutb, for example, opposed co-existence with non-Muslims and believed the world divided into "truth and falsehood" - Islam being truth and everything else being falsehood. "Islam cannot accept or agree to a situation which is half-Islam and half-Jahiliyyah ... The mixing and co-existence of the truth and falsehood is impossible,"Qutb, Milestones, p.130 Western civilization itself was "evil and corrupt," a "rubbish heap."Qutb, Milestones, p.139
Olivier Roy explains Islamist attacks on Christians and other non-Muslims as a need for a scapegoat for failure.
<BLOCKQUOTE>Since Islam has an answer to everything, the troubles from which Muslim society is suffering are due to nonbelievers and to plots, whether Zionist or Christian. Attacks against Jews and Christians appear regularly in neofundamentalist articles. In Egypt, Copts are physically attacked. In Afghanistan, the presence of western humanitarians, who are associated with Christian missionaries [despite the fact that many if not most have secular often leftist backgrounds] is denounced.Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1994) p.85</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Verses of the Quran and emnity===
But whatever the explanation, the sentiments of Qutb and Khomeini seem to clash with Quranic calls for moderation and toleration according to critics:
<BLOCKQUOTE>`all those who believe -- the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians -- anyone who believes in Allah and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret.` .</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>`We believe in what has been revealed to us, just as we believe in what has been revealed to you [i.e. Jews and Christians] Our God and Your God are the same; and it is to Him we submit.` [29:46] Aslan, (2005), p.103</BLOCKQUOTE> 
Another points out ayat endorsing diversity:
<BLOCKQUOTE>`If thy Lord had willed, He would have made humankind into a single nation, but they will not cease to be diverse ... And, for this God created them [humankind]` (11:118-119)</BLOCKQUOTE> 
 
<BLOCKQUOTE>`To each of you God has prescribed a Law and a Way. If God would have willed, He would have made you a single people. But God's purpose is to test you in what He has given each of you, so strive in the pursuit of virtue, and know that you will all return to God [in the Hereafter], and He will resolve all the matters in which you disagree.` (5:48)Abu al-Fadl, Place of Tolerance in Islam, (2002) p.16</BLOCKQUOTE>
... and that seem to be at odds with offensive jihad Qutb and others promote:
<BLOCKQUOTE>`If your enemy inclines towards peace, then you should seek peace and trust in God` (8:61)</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE>`... If God would have willed, He would have given the unbelievers power over you [Muslims], and they would have fought you [Muslims], Therefore, if they [the unbelievers] withdraw from you and refuse to fight you, and instead send you guarantees of peace, know that God has not given you a license [to fight them].` (4:90)</BLOCKQUOTE>
As Abu al-Fadl says, "these discussions of peace would not make sense if Muslims were in a permanent state of war with nonbelievers, and if nonbelievers were a permanent enemy and always a legitimate target." Abu al-Fadl, Place of Tolerance in Islam, (2002) p.20-21
===Sunna and emnity===
The policies of the prophet - whose behavior during the 23 years of his ministry makes up Sunna or model for all Muslims - after conquering Mecca were notably light on bloodletting. While everyone was required to take an oath of allegiance to him and never again wage war against him, he "declared a general amnesty for most of his enemies, including those he had fought in battle. Despite the fact that tribal law now made the Quraysh his slaves, Muhammad declared all of Mecca's inhabitants (including its slaves) to be free. Only six men and four women were put to death for various crimes, and not one was forced to convert to Islam, though everyone had to take an oath of allegiance never again to wage war against the Prophet." Aslan, (2005), p.106
===Alleged conspiracies against Islam===
Khomeini believed "imperialists" - British and then American - had 300-year-long "elaborate plans for assuming control of" the East, the purpose of which was "to keep us backward, to keep us in our present miserable state so they can exploit our riches, our underground wealth, our lands and our human resources. They want us to remain afflicted and wretched, and our poor to be trapped in their misery ... "Islam and Revolution, p.34 
One complaint of this approach by critics is that these "conspiracy theor[ies]" revolving around the "ready-to-wear devil" of the West are "currently paralyzing Muslim political thought. For to say that every failure is the devil's work is the same as asking God, or the devil himself (which is to say these days the Americans), to solve one's problems." Roy, Failure of Political Islam (1994) p.19-20 
===Christian Crusades===
The belief of some, such as Sayyid Qutb, that the Crusades were an attack on Islam,for example, Sayyid Qutb who believed the motivation of European imperialism was not "economic or political" but the same anti-Islamic hatred that drove the medieval crusades, or as he put it a "mask" to cover "the crusading spirit, since it is not possible for it to appear in its true form, as it was possible in the Middle Ages." from Qutb, Milestones, p.159-160 or at least "a wanton and predatory aggression" of Muslim countries from which Muslims developed a rightful mistrust of Christians/Europeans/Westerners, has been called into question.
According to historian Bernard Lewis, the Crusades were indeed religious wars for Christians, but to 
<BLOCKQUOTE>recover the lost lands of Christendom and in particular the holy land where Christ had lived, taught and died. In this connection, it may be recalled that when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant not much more than four centuries had passed since the Arab Muslim conquerors had wrested theses lands from Christendom - less than half the time from the Crusades to the present day - and that a substantial proportion of the population of these lands, perhaps even a majority, was still Christian." Lewis, Islam and the West, (1993), p.12</BLOCKQUOTE> 
The Arab Muslim contemporaries of the Crusaders did not refer to them as "Crusaders or Christians but as Franks or Infidels". Rather than raging at their aggression, "with few exceptions, the Muslim historians show little interest in whence or why the Franks had come, and report their arrival and their departure with equal lack of curiosity."Lewis, Islam and the West, (1993), p.13 Crusaders and Muslims allied with each other against other alliances of Crusaders and Muslims.Maalouf, Amin, The Crusade Through Arab Eyes (1985) p.72 Rather than being event of such trauma that Muslims developed an old and deep fear of Christians/Europeans/Westerners from it, the crusaders' invasion was just one of many such by barbarians coming from "East and West alike" during this time of "Muslim weakness and division." 
 
Lewis argues that any traumatization from the Crusades felt by Muslims surely would pale in comparison to what European Christendom felt from Islam. The Crusades started in 1096 and the Crusaders lost their last toe-hold when the city of Acre, was taken less than a hundred years later in 1291, whereas Europe felt under constant threat from Islam, "from the first Moorish landing in Spain [711] to the second Turkish siege of Vienna [1683]."
<BLOCKQUOTE> All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christian rulers, and the vast majority of the first Muslims west of Iran and Arabia were converts from Christianity. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe. In Spain and in Sicily, Muslim faith and Arab culture exercised a powerful attraction, and even those who remained faithful to the Christian religion often adopted the Arabic language." Lewis, Islam and the West (1993), p.13</BLOCKQUOTE> 
William Cantwell Smith observes that 
<BLOCKQUOTE>until Karl Marx and the rise of communism, the Prophet organized and launched the only serious challenge to Western civilization that it has faced in the whole course of its history ... Islam is the only positive force that has won converts away from Christianity - by the tens of millions ...Pipes, In the Path of God, (1983) p.85</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Division of Muslim world into many separate states===
According to the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Islamists, one glaring example of an attempt by the West to weaken the Muslim world was the division of the Ottoman Empire, the largest Muslim state and home of the Caliph, into 20 or so "artificially created separate nations," when that empire fell in 1918. Western powers did partition the Arab world (which made up most of the Ottoman Empire) after World War I, while the general Arab Muslim sentiment in much of the 20th Century was for wahda (unity).
Was this a case of divide and rule policy by Western imperialists?Khomeini, Islamic Government in Islam and Revolution Translated and annotated by Hamid Algar, (1981), p.48-49
International relations scholar Fred Halliday points out there were plenty of other explanations for the continued division: rivalries between different Arab rulers and the reluctance of distinct regional populations to share statehood or power with other Arabs, rivalries between Saudi Arabia and Yemen in the Peninsula or between Egypt and Syria. Anger in Syria over Egyptian dominance in the United Arab Republic that led to its division in 1961. The difficulty of unifying a large group of states even though they share much the desire, the same language, culture and religion is mirrored in the failure of Latin America to merge in the first decades of the 19th century after the Spanish withdrawal, when "broad aspirations, inspired by Simon Bolivar, for Latin American unity foundered on regional, elite and popular resistance, which ended up yielding, as in the Arab world, around twenty distinct states."
The more general claim that imperialism and colonialism divide in order to rule is, in broad terms, simplistic: the overall record of colonialism has been to merge and unite previously disparate entities, be this in 16th century Ireland, 19th-century India and Sudan or 20th century Libya and Southern Arabia. The British supported the formation of the League of Arab states in 1945 and tried, in the event unsuccessfully, to create united federations first in Southern Arabia (1962-7) and then in the Gulf states (1968-71). As Sami Zubaida has pointed out in his talks, imperialism in fact tends to unite and rule. It is independent states such as India and Pakistan (later Pakistan and Bangladesh), as well as Ireland, Cyprus and indeed, the USSR and Yugoslavia, that promote fragmentation." Halliday, 100 Myths about the Middle East, (2005), p.102-3
===Alleged Jewish conspiracies against Islam===
Islamists from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood on the moderate end ("Such are the Jews, my brother, Muslim lion cub, your enemies and the enemies of God"column `Recognize the Enemies of Your Religion` from October 1980 children's supplement of al-Da'wa magazine entitled `The lion Cubs of al-Da'wa` quoted in Kepel, Le Prophete et Pharaon, p.112), to the bin Laden at the extreme ("Jews are masters of usury and leaders in treachery"from 53-minute audiotape that "was circulated on various websites." dated Feb. 14, 2003. "Among a Band of Knights." quoted in Messages to the World, (2005) p.190,), have issued powerful and categorical anti-Jewish statements.
Among Islamist opinion makers, both Qutb and Khomeini talked about Jews as both early and innate enemies of Islam. Qutb believed that 
<BLOCKQUOTE>At the beginning the enemies of the Muslim community did not fight openly with arms but tried to fight the community in its belief through intrigue, spreading ambiguities, creating suspicions.</BLOCKQUOTE>
And goes on to say, "the Jews are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of the family and the dissolution of society." Sayyid Qutb, "Ma'rakatuna ma'a al-Yahud," [essay] 1951. Published in book of the same name Ma'rakatuna ma'a al-Yahud (Our battle with the Jews), Jedda, Saudi Arabia, 1970
Khomeini mentions the "Jews of Banu Qurayza", who were eliminated by Muhammad, as an example of the sort of "troublesome group" that Islam and the Islamic state must "eliminate."Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, (1981), p.89 
and explains that "from the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam has had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems."Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, (1981), p.27-8
Qutb's anti-Judaism has been criticized as obsessive and irrational by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon who quote him saying <BLOCKQUOTE>that `anyone who leads this community away from its religion and its Quran can only be Jewish agent` - in other words, any source of division, anyone who undermines the relationship between Muslims and their faith is by definition a Jew. The Jews thus become the incarnation of all that is anti-Islamic, and such is their supposed animosity that they will never relent `because the Jews will be satisfied only with destruction of this religion [Islam].` The struggle with the Jews will be a war without rules, since `from such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evilness.` The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, p.68) (quotes from David Zeidan, `The Islamic Fundamentalist View of Life as Perennial Battle, Middle East Review of International Affairs, v.5, n.4 (Dec. 2001), accessed at meria.idc.aci.il/journal/2001/issue4/jv5n4a2.htm.</BLOCKQUOTE>
===Alleged Jewish conspiracy against the Prophet Muhammad===
But specifically there is the issue of Jews conspired against the Prophet Muhammad, those Jews being the Banu Qurayza mentioned by Khomeini, a tribe that collaborated with the Quraysh, the Muslims' powerful enemy, and whose men were executed and women and children sold into slavery in 627 AD as punishment.
That this event was the beginning of a Jewish-Muslim struggle is disputed by religious scholar Reza Aslan.
<BLOCKQUOTE>The execution of the Banu Qurayza was not, as it has so often been presented, reflective of an intrinsic religious conflict between Muhammad and the Jews. This theory, which is sometimes presented as an incontestable doctrine... is founded on the belief that Muhammad ... came to Medina fully expecting the Jews to confirm his identity as a prophet ... To his surprise, however the Jews not only rejected him but strenuously argued against the authenticity of the Qur’an as divine revelation. Worried that the rejection of the Jews would somehow discredit his prophetic claims, Muhammad had not choice but to turn violently against them, separate his community from theirs,</BLOCKQUOTE> 
Aslan believes this theory is refuted by historical evidence:
*The Banu Qurayza were not executed for being Jews. Non-Jews were also executed following the Battle of the Trench. "As Michael Lecker has demonstrated, a significant number of the Banu Kilab -- Arab clients of the Qurayza who allied with them as an auxiliary force outside Medina -- were also executed for treason." Lecker, Michael, Muslims, Jews, and Pagans: Studies on Early Islamic Medina, Leiden, 1995. Quoted in Aslan, (2005), p.93-4 Other Jews did not protest or side with the Banu Qurayza, and these Jews were left alone.
*Most Jews were untouched. The 400 to 700 Banu Qurayza men killed were "no more than a tiny fraction of the total population of Jews who resided in Medina" who are estimated to have been between 24,000 and 28,000Ahmad, Barakat, Muhammad and the Jews: A Re-Examination, New Delhi, 1979, pp.76-94 These "remained in the oasis living amicably alongside their Muslim neighbors for many years" until they were expelled "under the leadership of Umar near the end of the seventh century C.E." along with all the other non-Muslims "as part of a larger Islamization process throughout the Arabian Peninsula." Aslan, (2005), p.94 
*"Scholars almost unanimously agree, the execution of the Banu Qurayza did not in any way set a precedent for future treatment of Jews in Islamic territories. On the contrary, Jews throve under Muslim rule, especially after Islam expanded into Byzantine lands, where Orthodox rulers routinely persecuted both Jews and non-Orthodox Christians for their religious beliefs, often forcing them to convert to Imperial Christianity under penalty of death. In contrast, Muslim law, which considers Jews and Christians `protected peoples` (dhimmi), neither required nor encouraged their conversion to Islam. ... In return for a special `protection tax` called jizyah, Muslim law allowed Jews and Christians both religious autonomy and the opportunity to share in the social and economic institutions ..." 
"Finally and most importantly, ... Jewish clans in Medina -- themselves Arab converts -- were barely distinguishable from their pagan counterparts either culturally or, for that matter, religiously." 
*They spoke a language called ratan, and "[t]here is no evidence that they either spoke or understood Hebrew. Indeed, their knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture was likely limited to just a few scrolls of law, some prayer books, and a handful of fragmentary Arabic translations of the Torah -- What S. W. Baron refers to as a `garbled, oral tradition.`"Baron, Salo Wittmayer, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, v.3, New York, 1964 
*They "neither strictly observed Mosaic law, nor seemed to have any real knowledge of the Talmud," nor were Israelites, which, according to J.G. Reissener, precluded them from being considered Jews. A non-Israelites Jew being required to be `a follower of the Mosaic Law ... in accordance with the principles laid down in the Talmud,` according to the strong consensus of opinion among Diaspora Jewish communities.Reissener, H.G. "The Ummi Prophet and the Banu Israil," The Muslim World, 39, (1949) 
*In "their culture, ethnics, and even their religion, Medina's Jews ... were practically identical to Medina's pagan community, with whom they freely interacted and (against Mosaic law) frequently intermarried." Newby, Gordon, A History of the Jews in Arabia, South Carolina, (1988), pp.75-79, 84-5, quoted in Aslan, (2005), p.97
*Archeologists haven't found any "easily identifiable archeological evidence of a significant Jewish presence" at Medina. The usual "indicators -- such as the remnants of stone vessels, the ruins of immersion pools (miqva'ot), and the interment of ossuaries -- must be present at a site in order to confirm the existence there of an established Jewish religious identity."Reed, Jonathan, Archeology and the Galilean Jesus, A Re-Examination of the Evidence, Trinity Press International, (2000). Quoted in Aslan, (2005), p.97
==Hopes for world success and mass conversion==
The anti-Islamist website www.islamistwatch.org quotes disapprovingly from a book of pioneer Islamist author Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi that Islam is 
a comprehensive system which envisages to annihilate all tyrannical and evil systems in the world and enforces its own programme of reform which it deems best for the well-being of mankind.Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi Jihad in Islam p.19
Enforcing an Islamist program around the world would be greatly facilitated by mass conversion and according to Olivier Roy, "today's Islamist activists are obsessed with conversion: rumors that Western celebrities or entire groups are converting are hailed enthusiastically by the core militants."Roy, Failure of Political Islam, (1994), p.6-7 
 
Critic Daniel Pipes has also noted Islamist contempt for, and ambitions to convert, other cultures and religions, criticizing specifically the contempt of Islamists in the United States for the country they have immigrated to. He quotes, for example, the wish of one Islamist living in the U.S. that North America turn "away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]." The Danger Within: Militant Islam in America Commentary, November 2001 quoting "Ismail Al-Faruqi, a Palestinian immigrant who founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought and taught for many years at Temple University in Philadelphia."
Aside from the complaint that pushing for mass conversion of non-Muslims to a different religion and culture is intolerant and aggressive, Olivier Roy argues it is simply unrealistic. "[T]he age of converting entire peoples is past," as we live in an era where religious belief is considered a personal matter. Likewise, a strategy to gradually convert non-Muslims "until the number of conversions shifts the balance of the society," is also problematic. Conversion to Islam "in a Christian environment ... generally indicates a marginalized person, a fanatic or a true mystic," in any case people with little desire or ability to join or build "a mass movement." Roy Failure of Political Islam, (1994), p.6-7 
Pipes also argues many prominent conversions to Islam appears to be part of a "recurring" pattern, rather than a mass movement. As he puts it, "Islam - in both its normative and Nation variants" has become established "as a leading solace for African-Americans in need", specifically after trouble with the criminal justice system, If the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, Converts to Islam and includes a "well-established" oppositional "pattern of alienation, radicalism and violence."Converts to Terrorism
==See also==
*Islamism
*Liberal movements within Islam
*Apostasy in Islam
*Takfir
*War against Islam
== Further reading ==
*Abu al-Fadl, Khaled, Great Theft : wrestling Islam from the extremists, New York, NY : HarperSanFrancisco, c2005
*Abu al-Fadl, Khaled, The Place of Tolerance in Islam, Beacon Press, 2002
*Aslan, Reza, No God But God : The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Random House, 2005 
*Boulares, Habib, Islam, The Fear And The Hope, Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Zed Books, 1990
*Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn ed., Against Islamic Extremism: The Writings of Muhammad Sa'id al-Ashmawy, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, (1998)
*Fuller, Graham E., The Future of Political Islam, Palgrave MacMillan, (2003)
*Halliday, Fred, 100 Myths about the Middle East, Saqi Books, 2005,
*Kepel, Gilles, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2002.
*Khomeini, Ruhollah. Algar, Hamid (translator and editor). Islam and Revolution: Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981
*Lewis, Bernard, Islam and the West by Bernard Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1993
*Maalouf, Amin, The Crusade Through Arab Eyes (1985)
*Mawdudi, S. Abul A'la, Islamic Law and Constitution, edited and translated into English by Khursid Ahmad, Jamaat-e-Islami Publications, 1955
*Meddeb, Abelwahab (2003). The Malady of Islam. Basic Books. ISBN 0465044352.
*Pipes, Daniel, In the Path of God : Islam and Political Power, by Daniel Pipes, New York : Basic Books, c1983.
*Schirazi, Asghar, The Constitution of Iran : politics and the state in the Islamic Republic / by Asghar Schirazi, London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 1997 
*Taheri, Amir, Holy Terror, the Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism, Sphere Books, 1987
*Taheri, Amir, The Spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution by Amir Taheri, Adler and Adler c1985
==References==
== External links==
* No to Political Islam
Category:Islamism
Category:Islam-related controversies