Before setting the record straight, I feel it is vitally important to recognize that many people may have understandably felt threatened or hurt by this swirling controversy. As an African American who grew up during America’s civil rights era and whose ancestry includes people from the Mohawk nation, I’ve certainly felt threatened and fearful by hateful talk directed toward me. It pains me to know that people from various walks of life have been hurt by something I’ve said. To all those people who have felt imperiled by what they have seen or heard I would like to offer my sincere apologies. As you will hopefully see, this is not an accurate depiction of who I am as a human being nor of the religion that I have chosen as my way of life.

On a recent visit to London, protestors denounced me as a “hate cleric” and numerous attempts were made to keep  me from my speaking engagements.   I learned that the protests were instigated by a group called OutRage!  Based on what I have learned, this group has been accused of anti-Semitism and has a history of aggressively attacking religious leaders including the Archbishop of Canterbury (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutRage! and http://rosecottage.me.uk/OutRage-archives/carey98.htm). The group spent a great deal of time pouring over many years of my audio lectures and carefully selecting quotes that misrepresent me as homophobic and intolerant of Christians and Jews.

I have never been the target of protests and this attack left me unsure about how to deal with the situation. As I deliberated the controversy spread to Sweden. I realize now that I should have confronted my detractors immediately. I want to take this opportunity today to tell you exactly who I am.

My Track Record

I have been an Imam in Jamaica, Los Angeles, Toronto, and, Capetown.

Over the last three decades, I’ve visited over 58 countries in the east and west and spoken to tens of thousands of people. I’ve spoken at universities, stadiums, mosques, churches, TV programs and public squares. My audiences have included Muslims, non-Muslims, academics, laypersons, artists, political and religious leaders. By the Grace of Almighty God, I can say that people appreciated my talks wherever I travelled.

I have always stood against racism and ethnocentrism.  I have been a lifelong advocate of women’s rights and for decades have encouraged the empowerment of young people. I pioneered the first social service agency for Muslims in Toronto, Canada whose doors were open to all – rich and poor, Muslim and non-Muslim, gay or straight. As a counselor I learned first-hand of the terrible violence inflicted upon gay people by bullies and thugs and I publicly spoke out against it.

While I was in Toronto I was the first Imam to have inclusive sermons for the hearing impaired.  For years I was a regular columnist on religion for Canada’s largest newspaper, The Toronto Star.  I have also been an advisor to highly respected public institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum and the Toronto District School Board.

For the last 10 years I have worked with some of the most impoverished citizens of South Africa providing education, spiritual counseling and vocational opportunities for people living in the African townships.

Some of my closest blood relations are Christian and many well-wishers, colleagues and friends are of the Jewish faith. In no country where I have lived or any of the countries that I have visited has there ever been any confrontation between me and another faith community. It’s possible that those who have sought to malign my reputation may have missed all these things in doing their research. Or maybe furthering their own agenda at the cost of my name was a stronger incentive for them than speaking the truth.

The Allegations

With regard to my comments about the punishment for homosexuality, about 15 years ago I was approached by a group of gay Muslims who wanted me to re-interpret the basic principles of Islam. I refused and indicated to them the very serious condemnation  in Islam toward homosexuality.  My statements were a moral reprimand only. I understand now that they did give off the wrong impression. For that, I am sorry. I have never advocated violence, vigilantism or disregard for the rule of law.
Islamic scholarship is crystal clear that Muslim minorities must respect the laws of the countries in which they reside or leave to find another homeland. The overwhelming majority of Muslims living in the West are respectful of this fact and feel duty-bound to recognize the rights of others even if their views are contrary to what Islam holds as sacred.

The debate among those who support homosexuality and those who do not is an intensely polarizing one. Nevertheless, I think that this debate is essential and must continue for the common good of us all. I have always articulated my concern, both within my community and without, in a manner that has been respectful of the rights and duties of individuals in a pluralistic democracy.

A clip taken from another lecture made me appear to be intolerant of Christians and Jews. Toward the end of my talk I made a supplication for God to purify Islam’s third holiest shrine from the “filth of the Christians and the Jews.”  The implicit — and obvious understanding for anyone who heard my lecture — was that I was asking God to heal the spiritual corruption that afflicts some members of religious groups which in turn leads to injustice against innocent people. Spiritual purity has been the focus of prophets, teachers and reformers for thousands of years. Students of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths know this well. Prophet Jesus’ famous condemnation of the Pharisees is even known to many non-religious people. My supplication was not a blanket condemnation of all persons belonging to these two respected faith traditions. Such a statement would be in direct contradiction to Islam’s basic teachings and my own personal beliefs.  Indeed, there are Christians and Jews in Israel and abroad who have been in the forefront of speaking out against racism, violence and Islamophobia.  Their valour and commitment has earned my deepest respect.

No society is without disagreements. However, those disagreements should not be magnified to the point of obscuring the many universal principles upon which we do agree. This is the challenge for any society that sees all its citizens as equal. We share public space but not always opinions and ideas.  We will disagree, but we must continue to live together.  And we must strive to do that in peace.

May the peace and mercy of God be with you.

Respectfully yours,
Dr. Abdullah Hakim Quick

By Faiza Saleh Ambah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 31, 2008

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.

Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.

“The beauty of Islamic banking and the reason it can be used as a replacement for the current market is that you only promise what you own. Islamic banks are not protected if the economy goes down — they suffer — but you don’t lose your shirt,” said Majed al-Refaie, who heads Bahrain-based Unicorn Investment Bank.

The theological underpinning of Islamic banking is scripture that declares that collection of interest is a form of usury, which is banned in Islam. In the modern world, that translates into an attitude toward money that is different from that found in the West: Money cannot just sit and generate more money. To grow, it must be invested in productive enterprises.

“In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air,” said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. “Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold.”

In the Western world, bankers designing investment instruments have to satisfy government regulators. In Islamic banking, there is another group to please — religious regulators called a sharia board. Finance lawyers work closely with Islamic finance scholars, who study and review a product before issuing a fatwa, or ruling, on its compliance with sharia law.

Islamic bankers describe depositors as akin to partners — their money is invested, and they share in the profits or, theoretically, the losses that result. (In interviews, bankers couldn’t recall a case in which depositors actually lost money; this shows that banks put such funds only in very low-risk investments, they said.)

Rather than lend money to a home buyer and collect interest on it, an Islamic bank buys the property and then leases it to the buyer for the duration of the loan. The client pays a set amount each month to the bank, then at the end obtains full ownership. The payments are structured to include the cost of the house, plus a predetermined profit margin for the bank.

Sharia-compliant institutions also cannot invest in alcohol, pornography, weapons, gambling, tobacco or pork.

Computer engineer Tarek al-Bassam said the crisis made him glad that he had chosen an Islamic bank to take his money. His Islamic savings account has made about 4 percent profit, he said. “Usually it’s a very low risk or a very low gain. But I’m happy with it,” Bassam said.

He has also borrowed from an Islamic bank, to buy a building. Even if he’s late in his payments, he said, he will not have to pay cumulative interest or a larger sum than the one agreed upon. But he notes that under this system, it can be harder to get a loan than from a conventional bank. Islamic banks have stricter lending rules and require that their borrowers provide more collateral and have higher income.

Islamic banking has grown by about 15 percent a year since its modern inception in the 1970s, fueled by the Middle East oil boom of that decade. “There was a lot of hostility when we first started out. We were regarded with suspicion, especially by the regulatory authorities. We were an odd fish. Authorities only acquiesced when they saw the huge demand,” said Dar al-Mal al-Islami’s Faisal, who has been in Islamic finance since the late 1970s.

Islamic finance now accounts for about 1 percent of the global market, according to Majid Dawood, chief executive of Yasaar, a Dubai-based sharia financing consultancy…

Islamic finance first sparked interest in the United States in the late 1990s. The Dow Jones Islamic Index was established in 1999, and the Dow Jones Islamic Fund, which invests in sharia-compliant companies, the following year.

But interest cooled after some Islamic banks were accused of financing terrorism in a lawsuit filed by family members of Sept. 11, 2001, victims, and a lot of Persian Gulf money left the United States for Europe.

In 2004, the German state of Saxony-Anhalt issued a 100 million-euro sovereign Islamic bond. That same year, the first Islamic bank opened in Britain, which now has six Islamic financial institutions, including a retail bank.

Although the biggest Islamic banks are in the Persian Gulf — Dubai Islamic Bank, Kuwait Finance House and Saudi Arabia’s al-Rajhi Bank — Malaysia and London are growing as major centers of Islamic banking as well.

Islamic institutions are not immune to ills plaguing other banks, such as corruption charges and bad investments. Differences of interpretation between sharia scholars about what is permissible and what isn’t also create confusion. The sukuk market, which had doubled each year since 2004, growing to a total of about $90 billion in bonds issued, fell 50 percent this year after a Bahrain-based group of Islamic scholars decreed that most of the bonds were not compatible with sharia law.

But as banks turn borrowers away in these times of economic turmoil, Islamic institutions continue to close deals in Europe, the Gulf and the United States, bankers said. “Banks feel safer and more comfortable with us because we put down more money, more equity. We are not allowed to borrow with very little down,” said Tariq Malhance, a former chief financial officer for the city of Chicago who now heads Unicorn Investment Bank’s U.S. office.

And those who have been in Islamic banking for a long time now feel vindicated.

“The current financial collapse is an opportunity. The ugly side of Wall Street is exposed; it’s always been there but covered by a layer of glamour that is now stripped away,” Faisal said. “We are more conservative and sober in our investments. That used to be considered a handicap. Now it’s considered the height of wisdom.”

NEW YORK — The financial panic sweeping the globe is maddeningly complex, but the cause of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression is clear.

America has reveled for two decades in an orgy of debt. The U.S. national debt is now twice its net worth. From Wall Street’s “masters of the universe” financial powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman, and Morgan Stanley, to the humblest homeowners, America’s national motto became “borrow to the hilt and bet.”

The traditional regulated banking system was pushed aside by Wall Street’s financial titans who created their own money in the form of complex securities and furiously traded these exotic instruments and borrowed recklessly against them with little government regulation or oversight.

As Kevin Phillips points out in his prophetic book, Bad Money, America’s primary business became non-productive finance. Manufacturing fell to only 12% of GDP. Wall Street titans grew obscenely rich by simply passing around paper. Inflated or semi-worthless securities increased in bogus value at each stage of the trading process.

Wall Street was allowed to virtually print money and peddle toxic securities around the globe because the big financial houses and heads of hedge funds bought the politicians of both parties.

Equally important, the mammoth financial and housing bubble thus created was hailed by the Bush administration as proof positive of Republican free market philosophy and the true road to prosperity.

More cautious European and Canadian bankers were dismissed by Republican chest thumpers as financial sissies.

This Ponzi scheme worked so long as markets kept rising. When the music stopped – disaster.

It’s uncertain how far damage from America’s financial equivalent of Hurricane Katrina will spread. Hedge funds, money market funds and automakers could be next. Real estate losses may reach $636 billion by 2012.

All stock market gains of the past 10 years have been wiped out in the most dangerous crash since the 1930s.

The “free market” Republican administration has ended up nationalizing nearly $1 trillion worth of businesses, including the federal mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, and global insurer AIG. Welcome to Wall Street socialism.

One thing is now clear. When great empires run onto the financial rocks, their power quickly ebbs. France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, ended his once glorious rein in near bankruptcy caused by his long, ruinous wars with the British and Dutch. Louis XVI’s runaway borrowing to finance the American Revolution helped ignite the French Revolution. The Soviet Union’s collapse was caused by spending half its national income on arms, and failure to modernize industry.

Over the past decade, the U.S. foreign debt doubled. Japan and China now hold 47% of the U.S. foreign debt and finance Washington’s wars. The addition in recent days of at least $1 trillion in new debt will cause interest rates to rise and the dollar to weaken. Even the U.S. government’s AAA credit rating now is in question.

Washington may no longer be able to spend half the globe’s defence budgets.

The $12-13 billion a month wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end up costing $750 billion by December 2008. There will be less cash in Washington’s kitty to buy foreign dictators and prop up their regimes, as in the Mideast and Central Asia. Less cash to pay for little wars in Africa.

Less for exotic anti-missile systems and death rays.

America’s enormous global power is based as much on its financial might as military muscle. Wall Street has been the vehicle and policeman of America’s hegemony. It shaped the destiny of the globe and made many nations subservient to the demands of New York’s titan bankers. Wall Street is essential to raising capital for business expansion, but often it resembled New York’s ruthless loan sharks: Once you borrowed from them, you never got off the hook.

Americans will have to relearn the hard truth that you can’t borrow your way to prosperity.

CAIRO – Eighty scholars from 23 Turkish universities are working on a major project to classify and translate the Hadith (the collection of sayings of Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him). “Make no mistake, we are not after modifying or revising the Hadith,” Mehmet Gormez, deputy director of the religious affairs authority Diy and supervisor of the project, told IslamOnline in a phone interview.

“What we are actually doing is re-classifying, re-categorizing the Hadith and translating it into Turkish, no more no less.”

A hadith literally means “saying,” but in the Islamic technical sense, a hadith refers to the sayings of the Prophet, the Prophet’s acts, the Prophet’s tacit approval of an action or practice, or the Prophet’s attributes, whether physical or moral.

Gormez said the three-year project has to do with a new understanding of the Sunnah and Hadith and accordingly making them more understandable to today’s Turks.

He added that Turkish scholars working on the project, which will be completed by yearend, are taking early Muslim scholars, who had already revised the Hadith, as their basic reference.

“We have compiled all hadiths and read them to reclassify them anew,” he explained.

“We have also taken into account the unauthentic ones or those attributed falsely to the Prophet because to understand the true Hadith, you really need to (understand) the unauthentic sayings.”

Muslim scholars believe Hadith is integral to the understanding of Qur’an, since they are inseparably linked to each other.

They say it is impossible to understand the Qur’an without reference to Hadith because the Qur’an is the message and the Hadith is the explanation of the message by the Messenger himself.

Western Fuss

Gormez, a British trained theologian, said the re-classified Hadith will come in multiple volumes.

“It might be five or even six volumes; we are still not decided.”

He shrugged off media suggestions that Turkey was re-writing the Hadith and creating a new Islam.

“They made too much fuss and took the project out of its real context.

“We are neither fashioning a new Islam nor dare to alter the fixtures maxims of Islam,” Gormez said emphatically.

“The Western media have read what are doing from a Christian perspective and understood it in line with their Christian and Western cultures.”

When it comes to Islam, Gormez said, the Western media is used to focusing on women’s status and jihad.

Several British newspapers on Wednesday, February 27, ran stories on the Turkish project .

The Guardian headlines the story as “Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam.”

A day earlier the BBC reported the project under the headline “Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts.”

Gormez also refuted claims they would and edit out some hadiths, especially about women.

“No Muslim in the right mind would dare delete any hadith or tamper with the Prophet’s heritage.”

Source: IslamOnline

By Ramzy Baroud

The people of Somalia are enduring yet another round of suffering as Ethiopian forces wreck havoc in the capital, Mogadishu. Apparently in response to an attack on one of its units, and the dragging of a soldier’s mutilated body through the city’s streets, an Ethiopian mortar reportedly exploded in Mogadishu’s Bakara market on November 9, killing eight civilians. A number of Somalis were also found dead the following day, some believed to have been rounded up by Ethiopian forces the night before.

Nearly 50 civilians have reportedly been killed and 100 wounded in the two-day fighting spree between fighters loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts and government forces and their Ethiopian allies. A report, issued by Human Rights Watch, chastised both Ethiopian troops and ‘insurgents’ for the bloodletting. Peter Takirambudde, the watchdog’s Africa director, was quoted as saying, “The international community should condemn these attacks and hold combatants accountable for violations of humanitarian law – including mutilating captured combatants and executing detainees.”

Of course, one cannot realistically expect the international community to take on a constructive involvement in the conflict. Various members of this ‘community’ have already played a most destructive role in Somalia’s 16-year-old civil war, which fragmented a nation that had long struggled to achieve a sense of sovereignty and national cohesion.

To dismiss the war in Somalia as yet another protracted conflict between warlords and insurgents would indeed be unjust because the country’s history has consistently been marred by colonial greed and unwarranted foreign interventions. These gave rise to various proxy governments, militias and local middlemen, working in the interests of those obsessed with the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa.

Colonial powers came to appreciate the strategic location of Somalia after the Berlin Conference, which initiated the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The arrival of Britain, France and Italy into Somali lands began in the late 19th century and quickly the area disintegrated into British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland. Both countries sought to expand their control, enlisting locals to fight the very wars aimed at their own subjugation.

World War II brought immense devastation to the Somali people, who, out of desperation, coercion or promises of post-war independence, fought on behalf of the warring European powers. Somalia was mandated by the UN as an Italian protectorate in 1949 and achieved independence a decade later in 1960. However, the colonial powers never fully conceded their interests in the country and the Cold War actually invited new players to the scene, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

One residue of the colonial legacy involved the Ogaden province of Somalia, which the British Empire had granted to the Ethiopian government. The region became the stage of two major wars between Ethiopia and Somalia between 1964 and 1977. Many Somalis still regard Ethiopia as an occupying power and view the policies of Addis Ababa as a continuation of the country’s history of foreign intervention.

The civil war of 1991, largely a result of foreign intervention, clan and tribal loyalties, and lack of internal cohesion, further disfigured Somalia. As stranded civilians became deprived of aid, Somalia was hit by a devastating famine that yielded a humanitarian disaster. The famine served as a pretext for foreign intervention, this time as part of international ‘humanitarian’ missions, starting in December 1992, which also included US troops. The endeavour came to a tragic end in October 1993, when more than 1,000 Somalis and 18 US troops were killed in Mogadishu. Following a hurried US withdrawal, the mainstream media rationalised that the West could not help those who refuse to help themselves; another disfiguration of the fact that the interest of the Somali people was hardly ever a concern for these colonial philanthropists. Since then, the importance of Somalia was relegated in international news media into just another mindless conflict, with no rational context and no end in sight. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provided an impetus for US involvement in the strategic region; only one month after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz met with various power players in Ethiopia and Somalia, alleging that Al Qaeda terrorists might be using Ras Kamboni and other Somali territories as escape routes.

The US contingent was hardly neutral in the ongoing conflict. Reportedly, US troops were involved in aiding Ethiopian forces that entered Somalia in December 2006, citing efforts to track down Al Qaeda suspects. The Ethiopian occupation was justified as a response to a call by Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), whose legitimacy is questioned. TGF, seen largely as a pro-Ethiopian entity, had been rapidly losing its control over parts of Somalia to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which came to prominence in January 2006, taking over the capital and eventually bringing long-sought stability to much of the country. Their attempts engage the US and other Western powers in dialogue failed, however, as a US-backed Ethiopia moved into Somalia in December 2006. On January 7, 2007, the US directly entered the conflict, launching air strikes using AC-130 gunship. Civilian causalities were reported, but the US refused to accept responsibility for them.

The last intervention devastated the country’s chances of unity. It now stands divided between the transitional government, Ethiopia (both backed by the UN, the US and the African Union) and the Islamic courts (allegedly backed by Eritrea and some Arab Gulf governments). Recently, the UN ruled out any chances for an international peacekeeping force, and the few African countries who promised troops are yet to deliver (with the exception of Uganda).

This situation leaves Somalia once more under the mercy of foreign powers and self-serving internal forces, foreshadowing yet more bloodshed. Our informed support is essential now because the Somali people have suffered enough. Their plight is urgent and it deserves a much deeper understanding, alongside immediate attention.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

** Source: Arab News, Palestine Chronicle, ZNet