Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear

Executive summary about Islam by Bob Smietana

Steven Emerson has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims. That's how many dollars Emerson's for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. Leaders of the so-called "anti-jihad" movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.

The Secular Talibans in France

Executive summary about Islam by Dr. Habib Siddiqui

The French Republic is a far cry from Hobbes's notion of freedom. Last week, neo-Taliban Sarkozy's government gave birth to two new crimes: hiding one's face in public and encouraging another to hide her face. Sarkozy has made it clear that Muslim women who hide their faces are not welcome in France. The French government believes that "to hide the face breaches minimal needs of social life." So hiding one's face in public is now a misdemeanor, with a EUR150 fine and civic training to teach the criminal the need to show her face. It clearly targets the few Muslim women who wear the niqab. According to the prime minister's circular, women who hide their faces wear a badge of inferiority that is "incompatible with the principles of liberty, equality and human dignity affirmed by the French Republic." By refusing to interview and listen to the voices of women who wear niqab, the French government showed how narrow-minded and Taliban-like it is. The new law violates a fundamental principle that defines a free society. In a free society the individual should not be crushed by the majoritarian opinion, allows full expression of individuality, even signs and symbols that may offend some. There are limits that the society often imposes if unbridled freedom can cause harm.

It is simply absurd to believe that those Muslim women who wear niqab are a threat to public and national security, and neither the French police nor the president and French legislators have offered a shred of evidence suggesting any such connection. The French government claims that the new law had everything to do with women's equality, liberty and human dignity. These secular fanatics, closet bigots and xenophobes of the French Republic may like to read John Stuart Mill's short essay "On Liberty," published in 1859.
The new French law does not mesh well with the principles laid out by either Mill or Hobbes.

As I have noted elsewhere, niqab is practiced by a very small fraction within the Muslim community. The Islamic law concerning modesty in women's dress is found in the Qur'an and Sunnah. Imam Zamakhshari offered a very rational interpretation about the exemption. A woman may reveal the face and the hands in her salat, while she must cover the rest of her body. Then Allah commanded them to cover those parts with the khimar.Ó.

A reading of the tafsirs of the Qur'an from the early scholars of Islam makes it quite clear that covering the face was not something that was probably meant in the Qur'an. If a Muslim woman today wears niqab and burqa out of her sense of piety and interpretation of the divine text it is still her right to do so. No state authority should punish them for wanting to hide their faces in public when their conduct presents no danger to the public. The secular fanatics in France aught to measure their conducts against the very precepts of a free society that they claim to uphold. Shame on France and its French-fried-Talibans for enacting laws that epitomize bigotry and chauvinism!