Robert Carle

Preventing Extremism Together

On July 7, 2005, three bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other on three London Underground trains. An hour later, a fourth bomb exploded on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. The bombs were home-made organic peroxide-based devices, packed into rucksacks and detonated by the bombers themselves, all four of whom died. Fifty-six people were killed and 700 were injured. The bombings were carried out by four Muslim men, three of British Pakistani and one of British Jamaican descent. Two weeks later, four more British Muslim men launched another attack on the London Underground, but their bombs failed to detonate. The fact that all of the terrorists in these attacks were British nationals, many of whom seemed well integrated, alarmed government officials.

Robert Carle

Abstract

Tariq Ramadan calls himself a bridge builder between Muslims and European culture, but contradictions in his theology prevent him from fulfilling this role. He is an Islamic intellectual who espouses democracy and pluralism, yet he believes that shari‘a law is universal. He exhorts his European followers to refrain from anti-Semitic violence, yet he cites as an authority Sheikh Yusuf al- Qaradawi, who is an apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers. He calls for Muslims to be full participants in Western civic societies, yet he calls on Muslims to “resist” the neo-liberal economic order that forms the basis of Western society. Ramadan has made alliances with left wing politicians and academics in France, Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, but he has a pattern of disappointing and frustrating his leftist allies. In the wake of terrorist attacks in Britain and the Netherlands, the British and Dutch governments called upon Ramadan to support peaceable brands of Islam in these traumatized countries. These efforts failed because Ramadan’s most important constituency has always been “the Muslim street,” and this makes it difficult for him to embrace liberal principles.

Keywords: Tariq Ramadan . Yusuf al-Qaradawi . Paul Berman . Ian Buruma . Salafism . Muslims . Europe

Abdulaziz Sachedina

Oxford: Oxford University Press

The emerging field of Islamic Ethics is an exciting, relevant and vital branch of contemporary religious ethics. As an important medical contribution to the literature, Islamic Biomedical Ethics demonstrates the use of traditional Islamic values, theories of moral reasoning, juridical-ethical principles, and scholarly viewpoints to address a range of modern healthcare issues.

The word Hijab refers ‎to both the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women and modest Muslim styles of dress ‎in general. The Arabic word literally means curtain or cover (noun). Most Islamic legal systems ‎define this type of modest dressing as covering everything except the face and hands in ‎public. According to Islamic scholarship, hijab is given the wider meaning of modesty, privacy, and ‎morality. the words for a headscarf or veil used in the Qur'an are khimār (‎خمار‎) and jilbaab (‎جلباب‎), ‎not hijab. Still another definition is metaphysical, where al-hijab refers to "the veil which separates ‎man or the world from God. The etymology and meaning, according to the Encyclopedia of Islam ‎and the Muslim World, the meaning of hijab has evolved over time. The term hijab or veil is not ‎used in the Qur'an to refer to an article of clothing for women or men, rather it refers to a spatial ‎curtain that divides or provides privacy. The Qur'an instructs the male believers (Muslims) to talk to ‎wives of Prophet Muhammad behind a hijab. This hijab was the responsibility of the men and not ‎the wives of Prophet Muhammad. However, in later Muslim societies this instruction, specific to the ‎wives of Prophet Muhammad, was generalized, leading to the segregation of the Muslim men and ‎women. The modesty in Qur'an concerns both men's and women's gaze, gait, garments, and ‎genitalia. The clothing for women involves khumūr over the necklines and jilbab (cloaks) in public ‎so that they may be identified and not harmed. Guidelines for covering of the entire body except ‎for the hands, the feet and the face, are found in texts of fiqh and hadith that are developed later.‎