Professor Walid Phares reports on a meeting of Muslim moderates taking place right now:
Where are the Muslim moderates?
That is a question that many in the West have been asking in recent years. Now it’s possible to provide an answer: They’re in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Between March 4 and March 7, the city is hosting the first ever Secular Islam Summit. Organized by the Center for Inquiry Transnational, an organization that promotes “science, reason, free inquiry,” as well as countless activists, the conference features more than two dozen speakers and about two hundred participants with varying religious and political backgrounds and nationalities. It is among the first conferences to bring together Muslim intellectuals for the purpose of discussing the threat of Islamic jihadism and finding secular and liberal expressions of Islam. (more)
Phyllis Chesler, who chaired the opening meeting of the Summit, published an article today telling her experience of being married to a Muslim man she had met at an American college. She thought him charming and Westernised but all that changed when she went to Afghanistan to be his wife. Her experience of living in Aghanistan is definitely worth reading.
In the same article she reported the following on the Florida Summit, together with her own conclusions:
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.