Profiles in courage: Standing up to fundamentalism

by Stanley A. Weiss

Ever since Osama bin Laden appeared on the world stage, spewing his hate-filled, medieval brand of Islam, Western commentators have asked: Where are the Muslim moderates?

Newsweek magazine's Fareed Zakaria even called the "cowardice of moderates" to speak up one of "the most troubling realities of the Muslim world today."

Western critics should look closer. From Africa to Southeast Asia, a battle is raging for the soul of Islam. Progressive Muslim clerics, intellectuals, journalists and activists are bravely taking on the fundamentalists and risking their lives in the process.

They are true profiles in Muslim courage and the best hope for saving the world's fastest-growing religion from the grip of religious totalitarianism.

In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, 35-year-old Ulil Abshar-Abdalla is fed up with the fundamentalists. A leader of the moderate Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's largest Muslim organization with 30 million members, Ulil founded the Liberal Islam Network to counter what he calls the "tyranny" of extremists and their literal reading of the Qur'an.

His recent call for a "revitalization" of Islam, including separation of mosque and state, outraged hard-line clerics who called his ideas blasphemous, for which the punishment is death. But Ulil is unbowed.

"We don't want the public to believe that they cannot challenge the radicals' claim to know what's right and wrong," he says. "If we don't criticize them, their fundamentalism will likely stifle differing opinions."

While the world has focused on Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari, who had been sentenced to death for advocating an "Islamic Protestantism," another critic of the Tehran theocracy inspires democracy activists from behind bars. Ali Afshari, a 28-year-old leader of the 1999 student protests that shook Iran, has spent much of the last three years in prison for saying Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should be subject to the Iranian constitution, not the other way around.

Despite what he called "tremendous psychological and physical pressures" during 328 days of solitary confinement, Afshari used a brief release from prison last year to again condemn the regime. From his cell this fall, he railed against the "destructive and repressive policies" of the hard liners.

Afshari remains defiant: "I'm prepared to pay even a heavier price for defending the rule of law and democratic reforms."

In Afghanistan, Sima Samar proves that "Muslim feminist" is not an oxymoron. Under the Taliban, the 46-year-old physician defied death threats by operating secret clinics and schools for women. At last year's State of the Union address, President Bush honored her as Afghanistan's first minister for women's affairs, a position she reluctantly resigned last summer after death threats from conservative clerics who branded her "Afghanistan's Salman Rushdie."

Now head of Afghanistan's human rights commission, Samar requires 24-hour-a-day bodyguards but declares she's "willing to die" to show that "Islam does not teach lack of respect for women."

In Saudi Arabia, where the ruling family long ago partnered with the puritanical Wahhabi clerics, journalist Jamal Khashoggi is questioning the "fanaticism" of the kingdom's ultraconservative mores. "We need serious change of the religious establishment," he has said, and "we need to develop our system more to be part of the free world."

Of a nation that largely refuses to acknowledge that 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi, Khashoggi laments, "We are not even trying to guarantee it will not happen again by studying its roots and causes."

Why risk persecution? "It is my duty to oppose (extremism)," he says, "because I don't want to see more of my people follow that path."

In Pakistan, home to some 40,000 religious schools, or madrassahs, physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy rails against the "subversion of science" by a "religious orthodoxy" that rejects modernity and stifles intellectual curiosity.

Hoodbhoy has spent three decades advocating a "secular humanism" grounded in reason and logic. Although harassed by radicals and threatened with death, he continues to call for a return to the "Islamic tradition" that encouraged scientific inquiry and freedom of thought.

And there is Sari Nusseibeh. An outspoken voice for co-existence between Palestinians and Israelis, the 53-year-old philosophy professor at East Jerusalem's Al-Quds University has been jailed by Israel and savagely beaten by Palestinian militants.

As the chief Palestinian representative in Jerusalem, he condemned suicide attacks against Israelis civilians as "morally unjustified" and "totally unacceptable." Fired by Yasser Arafat last month and facing angry student protests, Nusseibeh continues to implore his fellow Palestinians that non-violent resistance is the only "path to sanity."

The British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke famously observed that, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

The world is indebted to these and many other brave Muslim men and women who refuse to do nothing. They are courageously standing up to the barbarians who would hijack their religion of peace.

A version of this story appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Feb. 16, 2003.