In Islamic State war, like others, heritage always a target

CAIRO (AP) — A nearly 2,000-year-old temple in the Syrian city of Palmyra this week was the latest victim in the Islamic State group's campaign of destruction of historic sites across the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria. The group has destroyed ancient buildings and artifacts, as well as shrines to Shiite and Sunni Muslim saints — looting some sites for profit — all in the name of purging what it considers symbols of idolatry to create a society dedicated solely to its extreme and violent interpretation of Islam. The IS campaign has horrified many around the world with a scope of destruction that hasn't been seen for decades. Still, it isn't unprecedented. Throughout the centuries, invaders, religious fanatics and colonizers have targeted works of art, houses of worship and other pieces of heritage. The goal is often to uproot, eliminate, replace or impose control over the culture and heritage of their opponents. Nearly every ethnic or religious conflict across history has seen at least some cultural destruction, along with genocides like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Below is a look at some examples: WAHHABISM The Islamic State group's rabid ideology against shrines and historical sites is rooted in Wahhabism, the ultraconservative Sunni Muslim interpretation preached by Sheikh Mohammed Abdul-Wahhab, who lived in the 1700s in what is now Saudi Arabia. Allied with the powerful Saud family, Abdul-Wahhab's followers destroyed anything they saw as promoting idolatry or polytheism, including shrines of Shiite and Sufi saints, and the destruction of a major Shiite shrine at Karbala in what is now Iraq. Today, the alliance with Wahhabism remains one of the foundations of rule by the Al Saud royal family. PROTESTANT REFORMATION During the Reformation in 16th century Europe, Protestant preachers railed in sermons against Catholic statues of saints and other religious relics as forms of idolatry. Mobs of Protestants attacked hundreds of Catholic churches, particularly in France, Germany and the Netherlands, destroying statues and images — and in England under King Henry VIII, churches were stripped of their relics and riches. The result erased from Europe's cultural landscape untold numbers of works of art. SPAIN During the Muslim invasion of Spain in the 8th century, churches were often destroyed or turned into mosques. Conversely, when Christians took back the peninsula in the centuries-long Reconquista, completed in the 15th century, they destroyed mosques or turned them into churches. Also, after King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella ordered the expulsion of Jews from the peninsula in 1492, synagogues were turned into churches. SECOND JEWISH TEMPLE IN JERUSALEM Roman armies destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. after a revolt against Roman rule. The temple, built 500 years earlier to replace the first temple destroyed by the Babylonians, was the heart of Judaism. The first temple had held the Ark of the Covenant, which vanished after the Babylonian conquest. All that remains of the second temple is its Western Wall, which is today the holiest site in Judaism, located at the base of Jerusalem's Temple Mount. THE AZTECS' TEMPLO MAYOR Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in 1521, bringing to an end the empire that ruled over much of what is now Mexico. To root out the local religion, Cortes ordered temples destroyed, including the Templo Mayor, the giant step pyramid at the center of Aztec spiritual culture — and site of their human sacrifices. The temple was leveled, and a Catholic church built on its remains. Parts of the temple were uncovered in the 1970s during the digging of a metro in Mexico City. BENIN From the 15th to 17th centuries, Benin — in modern-day Nigeria — was one of the grandest capitals in Africa. In the late 19th century, negotiations with the British trying to dominate the area and its trade turned bloody, with Benin's troops killing a British expeditionary force. In retaliation, British troops captured the city and burned it to the ground, destroying its palaces and religious sites. They also carted off some 2,500 works of art, including bronze and ivory sculptures and plaques and the palace's carved wooden gate. BEIJING'S OLD SUMMER PALACE During the Second Opium War, waged by Britain and France against China to force it to open up markets and legalize the opium trade, British troops in 1860 destroyed the sprawling Old Summer Palace in retaliation after the Chinese tortured and executed members of a British diplomatic mission. Built some 100 years earlier, the palace was a sprawling complex of palaces, pavilions and gardens filled with works of art. After orders came from Britain's High Commissioner in China, Lord Elgin — notorious for his looting of marbles from Greece's Parthenon — it took 3,500 troops three days to burn down and tear apart the palace. BABRI MOSQUE Hindu extremists tore down the 16th-century Babri Mosque in northern India in 1992, sparking riots across the country that left at least 2,000 people dead. Hindu groups claim the mosque was built after a temple dedicated to the Hindu god King Rama was destroyed by Muslim invaders, though that claim is disputed by some historians. Still, it's undisputed that over the centuries, Muslim invaders of South Asia did destroy Hindu holy sites. For example, the Somnath Temple in western India was destroyed multiple times by Muslim rulers, the first time in the 11th century. MODERN-DAY ISLAMIC MILITANTS For decades in the 20th century, Islamic militant groups in the Middle East, including al-Qaida, put little emphasis on destroying shrines or historical sites. But al-Qaida's ally the Taliban brought back the tactic in dramatic fashion in 2001 when they blew up the two towering 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha carved into a mountain in the Afghan region of Bamiyan, stunning the world. Since then, the tactic has gained prominence among Islamic extremists as a way to tout their claim to "purify" society and create their vision of an Islamic state. Sunni hard-liners have increasingly attacked shrines across the Middle East. In the West African nation of Mali, Islamic radicals in 2012 overran Timbuktu, the historic city of Islamic culture. The militants destroyed 14 of the city's 16 tombs of prominent figures and thinkers and also targeted the library of camel-skin-bound manuscripts dating back to the 13th century that included ancient learning in astronomy, law, history and philosophy. They set fire to the institute where many of the manuscripts were stored, destroying an estimated 4,000 — though the majority were successfully spirited out of the city by the library's custodians. Join the conversation about this story »

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The Truth About Islam and Sex Slavery History Is More Complicated Than You Think

New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi recently outlined the Islamic State's systematic, logistically complex program of sex trafficking of captured Yazidi women and girls. Her narrative is chilling; the survivors' testimonies are horrifying. It is obvious that ISIS soldiers (and leaders) commit terrible abuses, including widespread rape. In addition to adding specific charges to the year-long trickle of information about ISIS sexual offenses, Callimachi's story makes a bold pronouncement: the Islamic State espouses a "theology of rape." According to the people Callimachi spoke to for the story, ISIS soldiers justify rape of captives as not only religiously licit, but also spiritually praiseworthy. Her observations dovetail with the centrality of enslavement to ISIS propaganda: enslaving captives demonstrates its prowess. ISIS taunts Western opponents but reserves its deepest scorn for Muslims who reject slavery and all it entails. Its English-language magazine Dabiq contains arguments that enslaving disbelievers is "a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one were to deny or mock, he would be ... thereby apostatizing from Islam." Though ISIS soldiers attribute religious merit to enslavement of Yazidi girls and women, many other Muslims, like those ISIS criticizes in its propaganda, oppose its actions and categorically reject the possibility of contemporary slavery. Callimachi suggests that "Scholars of Islamic theology disagree ... on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery." She quotes me expressing the position that "sexual relationships with unfree women" were "widespread" in the seventh century, and not "a particular religious institution." Princeton theology researcher Cole Bunzel, her opposing voice, disagrees. He points out, reasonably, that repeated scriptural and jurisprudential references to slaveholding (which include the permissibility of sex with "those your right hands possess") exist. While he notes that "you can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance, ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived." This is a fair representation of ISIS's position. Yet this does not mean, as critics of Islam would have it, that the Islamic State's position on the legitimacy of owning -- and having sex with -- slaves is unquestionable. (For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category "rape" doesn't apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant.) Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn't mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Slavery was pervasive in the late antique world in which the Quran arose. Early Muslims were part of societies in which various unfree statuses existed, including capture, purchase, inherited slave status and debt peonage. Thus, it is no surprise that the Quran, the Prophet's normative practice and Islamic jurisprudence accepted slavery. What is known of Muhammad's life is disputed, but his biographies uniformly report that slaves and freed slaves were part of his household. One was Mariyya the Copt. A gift from the Byzantine governor of Alexandria, she reportedly bore Muhammad a son; he freed her. Whatever the factual accuracy of this tale, its presence attests to a shared presumption that one leader could send another an enslaved female for sexual use. Like their earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome, jurists formulating Islamic law in the eighth to 10th centuries took slavery as a given. They formalized certain protections for slaves, including eventual freedom for women like Mariyya who bore children to their masters; such children were free and legitimate. Jurists sought to circumscribe slavery, prohibiting the enslavement of foundlings and prescribing automatic manumission for slaves beaten too harshly. But the idea that some people should dominate others was central to their conceptual world; they used slavery-related concepts to structure their increasingly hierarchical norms for marriage. Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn't particularly a religious institution, and jurists' ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries. To say this is not to present an apologetic defense of Islam; to the contrary, effective Muslim ethical thinking requires honesty and transparency about the lasting impact on Muslim thought on slavery and non-consensual sex. However, singling out slavery or rules governing marriage or punishments for a handful of crimes as constituting the enactment of "authentic" Islamic law surely reflects a distorted notion of a Muslim polity. The Islamic State's attempt to create an imagined pristine community relies on a superficial and selective enactment of certain provisions from scripture and law, an extreme case of a wider phenomenon. Religious studies scholars, of course, must analyze their doctrines. What beliefs do they express? How do they formulate them? What one mustn't do is take them at face value, as the legitimate expression of a timeless Islamic truth. In fact, the stress they put on the errors of their Muslim opponents, who actively dispute their interpretations of many things including slavery, makes very clear that there is no one self-evident interpretation of Islam on these points. There are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity. Muslim history reflects a wide variety of historically specific patterns of enslavement, slaveholding, manumission and abolition. Muslims in numerous countries spread across different continents lived as slaveholders and slaves for more than a millennium. Generations of jurists formulated rules that put social practice into conversation with revealed texts as well as customary law, but canonical texts did not always determine behavior. Across and even within societies, slavery encompassed a wide range of practices. "Islamic slavery" included conscript-convert Janissary troops, cooks, nannies, Mamluk military rulers, salt miners, pearl divers, craftsmen allowed to keep part of their wages, mothers of Ottoman sultans and the drudges who cleaned the royal harem quarters. Slavery was hierarchical and slaves were, in some times and places, assigned specific work based on ethnic origins. Slavery was not entirely racialized, however, and slaves were captured or bought from Europe, Asia and the Caucasus as well as Africa. In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine. The fact that the Islamic State must preface its collections of rulings for slaveholding by defining terms such as captive and concubine illustrates that it is drawing on archaic terms and rules, ones that no longer reflect anything like the current reality of the world. By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and in Assad's Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war. None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity. In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans -- whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime -- deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Where Does ISIS Stand A Year After It Declared Its Caliphate?

Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. Today, we speak with Charles Lister, visiting fellow at Brookings Doha Center, on the Islamic State. It's been one year since the Islamic State insurgent group declared its caliphate, changing its name and proclaiming leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the caliph of all Muslims. Since then, the group has radically expanded into a number of countries across the globe while seizing cities and towns in Iraq and Syria. Currently locked in a battle with regional forces on the ground and targeted by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, the extremist group is also the subject of an immense effort to take back the territory it brutally occupies. But in spite of this campaign, the militants have persisted and still control swaths of territory as well as significant resources. The WorldPost spoke with terrorism expert Charles Lister to understand how the group is functioning, the reality behind its expansion and what's changed in the year since the establishment of their so-called Islamic State. Lister is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, and author of both a book on the Islamic State and a forthcoming work on jihadist groups in Syria. Is the Islamic State group more or less powerful now in terms of territory, resources and fighting forces than it was a year ago? While it remains difficult to definitively measure the Islamic State's size in terms of a fighting force, the simple answer is that the group did grow as a fighting force since the declaration of its caliphate a year ago. At that time, the organization was purely a Syria- and Iraq-based organization, and they probably commanded about 25,000 to 30,000 fighters on the ground in those two countries. One year later, I would probably estimate those numbers to have doubled in Syria and Iraq. One year later, I would probably estimate those numbers to have doubled in Syria and Iraq. That significant increase in manpower on the ground can largely be explained by the group’s somewhat forced co-opting of smaller fighting forces in Iraq and young men in areas of Syria. The militants essentially co-opt them to join their organization when they’ve taken over their towns, and many of those men literally have no other options. Outside of Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State has expanded quite significantly -- perhaps an awful lot more than a lot of analysts would have expected a year ago. Are you referring to countries like Libya? Officially speaking, the Islamic State is now operating in 11 countries. Some of those are much smaller in scale than others. In Libya, the Islamic State has a fairly sizable force operating on the ground, controlling territory and providing governance and other services. In many respects they’re trying to replicate the model that we’ve seen develop in Iraq and Syria. We see this on a smaller scale in Egypt as well. Officially speaking, the Islamic State is now operating in 11 countries. In Nigeria, through the recent pledge of allegiance by Boko Haram, we clearly see a large militant organization now officially fighting on behalf of the Islamic State. When Boko Haram pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, it was unclear how strong the link was between the group in Nigeria and the organization in Iraq and Syria. Has that become more clear? It’s still quite vague, but what can be said is that the Islamic State has received a lot more pledges of allegiance than the group has actually accepted. That would tend to suggest that some kind of assessment is being made at a leadership level as to whether or not the Islamic State can feasibly accept a pledge of allegiance. Smoke rises from an Islamic State position in Kobani, Nov. 8, 2014. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) When the top leadership accepts a pledge of allegiance, those fighters presumably bring some level of trust or they represent something worthwhile for the organization. Has the network structure of the Islamic State group changed throughout the expansion? It’s still very heavily Iraq- and Syria-focused. The infrastructure of the group is minimal in other countries. But the fact that affiliates are able to carry out operations abroad feeds into the idea that the Islamic State is a growing transnational organization. One of the most important things we've seen watching the survival of the Islamic State over the last 12 months is that in many respects, perception is far more important than truth or fact. The perception that the Islamic State is expanding internationally is essentially self-fulfilling towards the group’s expansion. You mean as a recruitment tool? As a recruitment tool, but also that the Islamic State has basically founded itself on the idea of continual expansion. They have to continue to show that they are growing as a global Islamist movement. They have to continue to show that they are growing as a global Islamist movement. The fact is that Islamic State has suffered in Iraq a lot over the last 12 months, but they have gained affiliates internationally, and for the group’s supporters and potential recruits, that perception of continual expansion is extremely important. If the group continues to lose ground, how might that affect its strategy? The Islamic State has lost the town of Tal Abyad, one of their principle border crossings, in the last two to three weeks. What they've done since is launch diversionary operations to draw away Kurdish forces who were approaching their capital in Raqqa. It’s an age-old tactic of drawing your enemy away from the most critically important areas, and so far in northern Syria, it's given at least a temporary reprieve from what looked like a very serious threat to its de facto capital. But when the group really does start to seriously lose strategically valuable ground, it will be a real critical moment for the organization to survive at all. The Islamic State has tied success into continuing to control territory and to govern as a state. As soon as it loses territory its very being comes into question. Iraqi Shiite fighters from the Popular Mobilisation force keep position in the city of Baiji. (AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images) In the areas and cities under its control, how has its state building and ability to govern progressed? The level of success or failure varies in every area under its control. In Mosul, the reporting has been quite mixed. There have been some reports that the extent to which the group has been able to continue the provision of services has been equal if not slightly better than what the services were under government control. There has been a great deal of attention as to whether the Islamic State can rebuild roads and provide health care, and so on. The reality is that whether or not they’re able to do that, the primary mechanism of maintaining control over territory is a seriously aggressive extent of law and order threatened with executions, amputations and all kinds of other horrific punishments. In some senses they’ve been extremely smart, because the group has been able to maintain its extremist ideology but at the same time managed in large part to co-opt local professionals into continuing their jobs and providing some kind of a sense that cities are still running as they previously did. In many cases, such as Mosul, those civil services workers are still receiving their salaries from Baghdad. Exactly, and that actually provides the Islamic State with a money-earning capability because it taxes those salaries. In many respects the Islamic State’s continual ability to acquire money is one of the key facets of how it maintains some legitimacy and ability to provide services. One of the most important things it does when it first comes into a town is that it subsidizes core staple foods. It will immediately try and drop the price of bread. However, when the Islamic State’s financial capabilities decline they’ll no longer be able to do that. It’s all these factors, the finance, the services, the religious credibility and broader context outside of the territorial control, that allow the local people to essentially put up with them being the source of law. In that sense the money is extremely important. There have been efforts to cut off that money and funding. Have those had any success? I think it would be wrong to say that coalition efforts haven’t had any success, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the Islamic State is cash strapped at all. In that sense, the focus on the oil industry was perhaps slightly misconstrued. Oil has and will continue to be important to the Islamic State, but it was importing oil as well as exporting back when Mosul was captured. It’s important to note that the coalition did target IS oil infrastructure, but the targeting was only against makeshift oil refineries in the desert. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the Islamic State is cash strapped at all. There doesn’t seem to be a desire, and I think rightly so, to target large-scale infrastructure because of the implications it would have on a post-conflict context. The Islamic state’s biggest source of revenue is still taxation and extortion, and that is directly tied to its ability to control territory. So long as they control populations, it will be earning enough money to subsist and continue operations. There doesn’t seem to be any credible evidence that the Islamic state is suffering financially to any significant extent. How have conceptions of the Islamic State group as a non-state actor changed over the last year or so and how do you view them? At its heart, the Islamic State sees itself as an inherently Islamic organization. That’s how it presents itself and what almost all of its propaganda insists is the case. That’s how it sees itself on the ground, that’s how its objectives are formed. All through its own perception of ancient Islamist ideals, and it’s extremely important to acknowledge that. At the same time, what I would always be keen to emphasize is that the Islamic State is more than just an Islamic organization. They present themselves as a religio-political alternative and a force to protect Sunni-Arab Muslims from a perceived oppressive sectarian enemy. They are in that sense also an inherently political organization. The Islamic State is more than just an Islamic organization. The problem is that what the public sees from the Islamic State is its slick use of propaganda, and that use of propaganda is brutal and violent and it is continually sewn through with Islamic texts and rhetoric. But on a local level, there is a whole other type of propaganda that we see very little. That’s how it presents itself as a social movement that stands up for the poor and defends the oppressed, and presents itself as a more honorable, powerful future for the Sunni Arab population. Militants of Islamic State (IS) are seen just before explosion of air strike on Tilsehir hill near Turkish border on Oct. 23, 2014, at Yumurtalik village, in Sanliurfa province. (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images) Is there something that you think is underappreciated about the group? The coalition strategy as it currently exists is inherently Iraq-focused, but there needs to be a recognition of how important Syria is to the group. It’s not a coincidence that the group's capital is in Syria. It’s not a coincidence that when Mosul was attacked, about a quarter to a third of forces came from Syria and that within 24 hours a great majority of weapons taken from Mosul were transferred into Syria. Until we acknowledge the importance of that country to the Islamic State's expansion and survival, we’re fighting a losing battle from the very beginning. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. More from The WorldPost's Weekly Interview Series: - Have We Got ISIS All Wrong? - What Is The State Of Political Islam Today? - Was The Libyan Intervention A Mistake? - What Palestinian Membership In The ICC Really Means - Anguish In Argentina After Prosecutor's Mysterious Death - Could The New Syriza Government Be Good For Greece's Economy? - Naming The Dead: One Group's Struggle To Record Deaths From U.S. Drone Strikes In Pakistan -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Some Right-Wing Europeans Say Islam Hasn't Contributed to Western Culture. Here's Why They're Wrong.

One of the right-wing tropes about Islam in Europe, which is making alarming inroads into the mainstream, is that it represents a "culture of backwardness, of retardedness, of barbarism" and has made no contribution to Western civilization. Islam provides an easy target considering that some 3,000 or more Europeans are estimated to have left for the Middle East in order to fight alongside the Islamic State. The savage beheadings and disgusting treatment of women and minorities confirm in the minds of many that Islam is incompatible with Western civilization. This has become a widely known, and even unthinkingly accepted, proposition. But is it correct? Let us look at European history for answers. At least 10 things will surprise you: 1. Contrary to common belief, Muslims did not first arrive in Europe with the intention of conquering it. Intricate tile and mosaics decorates a room in the Nasrid Palaces at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Sean Gallup/Getty Images. A small military contingent landed on the southern coast of Spain in 711 in response to the pleadings of the Jewish community, which faced harsh persecution under the Visigoth rulers. The arrival of the Muslims and their victory prevented what New York University Professor David Levering Lewis terms "the final solution." Christian leaders like Count Julian, whose daughter had been dishonored at court, had also been requesting Muslim intervention. It is precisely this reason, the support of large sections of local society, that allowed the Muslims to so easily establish their domination over Al-Andalus. 2. By describing Muslims as "backward", "retarded" and "barbaric," it is suggested that they are not capable of balancing their religion with rational thought. Yet Muslims had already attained a balance between the two positions centuries before other European societies. Monument of Averroës, Manolo Blanco/Flickr. The debate between faith and reason that had been agitating Muslim philosophers and had begun since the birth of Islam and its first encounters with Greek philosophy found one of its most sophisticated votaries in Ibn Rushd, or Averroës, in 12th century Andalusia. Averroës' translations and commentaries on Aristotle and Plato so influenced scholars like Thomas Aquinas that he and others across Europe, assuming his name needed no elaboration, referred to Ibn Rushd simply as "The Commentator." 3. The first man ever to fly was the scholar Ibn Firnas near Cordoba in the 9th century. The Ibn Firnas bridge, Landahlauts/Flickr. An inventor, engineer and poet, he is credited for designing a water-clock, manufacturing colorless glass and making magnifying corrective lenses or "reading stones." One of the main bridges of Cordoba -- constructed in the form of gigantic wings -- is named in honor of his flight, as is an airport in Baghdad and a crater on the moon. 4. Cordoba, in Andalusia, was the most populous and glittering city of Europe in the 10th century. Circa 1955: In the old Moorish quarter of Cordoba the cathedral is visible at the end of a cobbled street. Three Lions/Getty Images. Its streets were lit and there were baths, gardens and libraries everywhere. The main library was estimated to have 400,000 books when the largest library in Europe, in Switzerland, had 800 volumes. Visitors came from all over the continent to marvel at Andalusian civilization, and a nun in Saxony called Hroswitha described it as ''the ornament of the world.'' 5. Islam is frequently accused of being intolerant and rejecting harmony with other cultures and religions. Yet Muslim Spain or Andalusian civilization offers one of the most shining examples of harmony, peace and prosperity between different religions in the history of Europe. People pray during an interreligious prayer outside the great mosque in Cordoba. JOSE LUIS ROCA/AFP/Getty Images. At one point the capacity of people of different faiths to live and work together in Andalusia was illustrated by its ruler Abd Al-Rahman III in the 10th century. His chief minister was Jewish and his ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I was the Catholic Bishop Racemundo. The Spanish term La Convivencia or Coexistence describes that time in Al-Andalus. Harmony at the political level engendered creativity and prosperity. Others saw it differently. Muslim tribes fresh from the deserts and mountains of North Africa looked on Andalusian society as decadent and corrupt. They destroyed Madina-at-Zahra, the beautiful royal town built in the hills near Cordoba considered the gem of Andalusian architecture. Scholars like the great Rabbi Maimonides and Averroës were forced into exile from their beloved Cordoba. 6. Two of the greatest novels of Western literature directly or indirectly bear the mark of Islamic culture. "Don Quixote" and "Robinson Crusoe" were selected by experts and critics as the number one and three respectively on the Guardian's list of "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time." Earle Havens, acting keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts of Boston Public Library, holds an 1824 children's chapbook of "Robinson Crusoe." AP Photo/Chitose Suzuki. In the first, Cervantes began his novel by disclosing, with tongue in cheek, that it was a manuscript written by an Arab called Cide Hamete Benengeli or Sir Hamid Aubergine. The theme and structure of the 12th century novel "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" (English translations were published from a Latin version in 1686 and the original Arabic in 1708) by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufail about a man stranded on an desert island with a companion, no female company and engaged in raising philosophical questions about the nature of society, foreshadowed Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (first published in 1719). In fact, the influence of "Hayy ibn Yaqdhan" on Europe was so great it "could be considered one of the most important books that heralded the Scientific Revolution." 7. Two of the most celebrated European rulers, Roger II, the king of Sicily, and Frederick II, the holy Roman emperor, were so influenced by Islamic culture that they spoke Arabic, had Muslim bodyguards and inscriptions in Arabic were written on their royal ceremonial mantle, which was worn by the holy Roman emperors at their coronations until the late 18th century. Circa 1230, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194 - 1250) of Germany. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Roger used Islamic designs and calligraphy to decorate his greatest project, the Palatine chapel in Palermo, which can be seen today. Frederick II admired Averroës so much that he sent translations of Averroës' work to European universities so that they could be studied and taught. Frederick II illustrated how a spectacular geopolitical victory can be gained without warfare and bloodshed when he was handed over Jerusalem peacefully during the Sixth Crusade by the sultan of Egypt due to the mutual respect they had for one another. In the case of Roger and Frederick, we see the Andalusian La Convivencia in reverse: Christian rulers accepting and appreciating their Jewish and Muslim subjects. 8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered the greatest of poets in the German language, wrote a powerful poem dedicated to the prophet of Islam. The memorial of revered German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller, right, is seen in Weimar. AP Photo/Jens Meyer. He made the enigmatic comment that expressed his admiration for Islam: "In Islam, we all live and die." 9. Napoleon in Egypt wore Arab dress, emphasized his respect for Islam and declared that he and the French were Muslim. An 1879 portrait of Queen Victoria. AP Photo. Queen Victoria called her personal assistant, Muhamma Abdul Karim, an Indian Muslim, her munshi, a term meaning teacher. Abdul Karim was so close to her that the relationship roused the envy of the royal household. The last German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, prided himself on the title "Hajji," and declared he would be the protector of the world's Muslims against European imperialism. 10. More European women than men are converting to Islam in spite of the widespread antagonism to the religion. German teacher Doris Graber converted to Islam. MICHAEL LATZ/AFP/Getty Images. Despite the perceived mistreatment of women in Muslim communities and the rising tide of aggressive secularism, they are finding solace and peace in Islam. * * * Today, too, Muslims are also making an impact -- and it is not all about the violence of the Islamic State and the thousands who have left to join them. Thirteen Muslim members of parliament have been elected in the recent elections in the U.K. Eight of them are women. Muslims are currently serving as government ministers in the U.K. There has been a captain with a Muslim background of the English cricket team, and there are many Muslims in the top European football clubs and on European national teams. Malala Yousafzai, who is originally from Pakistan, won the Nobel Peace Prize and now lives in the U.K. She is an internationally known activist for female education, now challenging Boko Haram for its attitude towards girls and pleading with the United Nations for more support for women. In the discussions of Islam that focus on acts of Muslim violence, such as those associated with the Islamic State, and provide fuel against Muslim immigrants from Africa and Asia, it is often overlooked that there are millions of indigenous Europeans such as Bosniaks, Albanians and Pomaks who are also Muslims. These indigenous Muslims form the majority population in Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Europe, therefore, has its own native population, which happens to be Muslim. These Balkan Muslims, like other Europeans, are committed to democracy, prosperity, education and the ability to live with people of different cultures and religions. As the debate around Islam continues to create controversy, anger and even violence, the "surprises" presented here may help to put the nature of Islamic civilization in its proper context. These are facts that would benefit not only non-Muslims but also Muslims. The critics of Islam, as much as those who advocate violence on its behalf -- groups like Islamic State, for example -- need to appreciate the cultural and intellectual sophistication of Muslim civilization when it was widely acknowledged as the most advanced in Europe. The destruction by the Islamic State of the ancient history of the Middle East, such as at Nimrud, and attacks on minorities are emblematic of their character. It is also an explicit rejection of the rich Muslim civilization that gloried in cultural, intellectual and philosophic sophistication. Muslims had achieved that reputation for a period of time because society offered its individuals, regardless of religion or race, the possibility of pursuing knowledge and working together to produce peace and prosperity. I am not advocating a return to the past for a moment. I am merely suggesting that there are lessons in history for us, if only we are prepared to think about and learn from them. Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, in Washington D.C. He is working on the film and book project called "Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration and Empire." -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Islamophobia in East-Central Europe

It's often said that anti-Semitism continues to exist in Poland even in the absence of a large Jewish community. The recent Polish film Aftermath, about a farmer who uncovers the terrible truth about his village's treatment of its Jewish community during World War II, makes that point vividly and tragically. The same can be said about Islamophobia. It too has taken root in countries in East-Central Europe where the Muslim populations are miniscule, like Poland and the Czech Republic. Anti-Islamic sentiment has also flourished in areas further south where the spread of the Ottoman Empire left sizable Muslim communities in Albania, former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Some of this Islamophobia is racism toward indigenous populations; some is xenophobia against immigrants. "Islamophobia gets all mixed up with chauvinism toward indigenous communities: anti-Turkish, anti-Bosniak, anti-Tatar elements," Taskin Tankut Soykan told me in a meeting in Warsaw in August 2013 when he was working for the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)'s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights as the adviser on Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims. "There are also racist elements mixed in with this," Soykan continued. "And it's all somehow linked to historic conflicts. Muslims in the region have been accused of helping the Ottomans during the invasion of the Balkans. They were treated as traitors. In Greece, anti-Turkish chauvinism is mixed with Islamophobia in a way to show how the Greeks were right when they were saying that Islam was a threat to their country and finally the West is recognizing their position. In the meantime, they also spread racism and xenophobia against immigrant communities, with neo-Nazi organizations physically attacking Pakistanis and Middle Eastern people. In Eastern Europe anti-Roma sentiment is also mixed in because many Roma people have Islamic background especially in Southeastern Europe. They are discriminated because they are Roma and because they are Muslims." There have been incidents of hate crimes in Poland against Muslims. But perhaps the oddest example of Islamophobia was a demonstration in Warsaw against the construction of an Islamic cultural center that would also include a mosque. Soykan was there to observe the event. "It was a very strange thing to observe," he told me. "There was a core group of maybe 100 or 150 people. Many of them were not in fact from Poland. A lot of them were well-dressed middle-class people. They weren't skinheads. They were part of this loose network called Stop the Islamicization of Europe. Some Polish people attended this event. The real organizers were trying their best to show that they were not racist. They brought in not only Buddhists but also people of African descent so that you could see they were not racist. They were also displaying Israeli flags to show that they were not anti-Semitic. The posters that they were using were not specifically targeting Muslims. They always said that they were trying to target terrorists or radical extremists. On the other hand, they were saying that mosques were places where terrorists are recruited. They also said the Islam is not a religion, but an ideology." Despite the protest, the center was eventually built. In Bulgaria, meanwhile, the grand mufti sent a list to the OSCE of more than 100 incidents of hate crimes against Muslims. "None of them had been prosecuted," Soykan reported. "Not even one investigation had been launched. We immediately decided to go to Sofia. We had meetings with civil society organizations from all communities: LGBT, Jewish, Roma, also refugees. All of them were telling us that hate crimes against Muslims were an issue in Bulgaria. But when we started talking to government officials from the ministry of justice and the prime minister's office, they told us exactly the opposite, that there was no problem, that Bulgaria was a European Union member state, and that such things could not happen in a European country. They were very angry at the office of the grand mufti for sending information to an international organization. They were basically saying that the mufti was lying." Soykan met with the vice minister of interior. "I showed him pictures of graffiti, the destroyed gates of mosques, the vandalism of graveyards, and I could see that he was turning red," he continued. "He was really disturbed. He said that he'd never seen these incidents before. He'd never been informed. But we knew that the European Court of Human Rights had made a number of decisions indicating that the Bulgarian authorities had violated their obligation to look into the motivation of the crimes when they happened. So, the vice minister of justice must have been aware of the situation." But out of this effort, the OSCE and Bulgaria agreed to establish a training of law enforcement officials on hate crimes. "Afterwards, we signed MOUs with several other countries, but Bulgaria was the first," Soykan related. "The program is called Tackle, and now we are training many law enforcement officers. This project in fact is implemented with the police academy. We devise the curriculum and we train trainers, and these trainers start training other police officers." Because of the improved communication, Muslims in Bulgaria have begun meeting with the police and chief prosecutor on hate crimes. In addition, an OSCE training module for imams in Bulgaria on recognizing and reporting hate crimes has been adapted for use throughout Europe. We began by talking about the diversity of the Muslim communities in East-Central Europe and then moved on to discuss media representations, cases at the European Court of Human Rights, and the future of Islam and Islamophobia in Europe. The Interview You mentioned the diversity of the Muslim community here in Poland, and the differences between the indigenous Muslim community and the Muslims who are coming here from outside the country. This is not just in Poland. In other countries too, there is a similar perception. But it is more visible here. Usually, the Tatars are identified as the indigenous Muslims of Poland. They are well integrated and are considered Polish Islam. They are indeed quite different from Muslims in other parts of Europe or in the Middle East in many respects. For example a few years ago, there was a visit of a Saudi delegation to Poland to establish commercial relations between the two countries. Poland wanted to show that Islam is part of the culture of the country. They wanted to take the Saudi delegation to visit the Tatar mosque in Bialystok in the eastern part of the country. But when they saw this mosque, the delegation was surprised: the mosque didn't look like a mosque. It didn't have a proper minaret. It looked like a kind of church. Nonetheless the delegation wanted to continue. When they approached the mosque, they saw the imam sitting at a table in the courtyard. They said hello. But when they came close, they realized that he was sitting there with a glass of vodka. This was a huge surprise for the Saudi delegation. They said, "This is not Islam." But from the Polish side, it was their Islam! I witnessed something similar when the Organization of Islamic Conference organized a conference on Muslim communities in Eastern Europe. The mufti of Poland was cohosting the event. He came to the opening ceremony with his wife. She was wearing a miniskirt. For many imams and sheiks, this was quite shocking. But for the Polish mufti, this was quite normal. So, in this way you can also see how the image of Islam is constructed in Poland. Poles always want to distinguish "our Islam" from foreign Islam. If they want to say something negative about Islam, they say that it is external, that it looks different and is coming from the outside. In a way, they are normalizing and legitimatizing xenophobia against certain groups. Immigrant communities always fear that they are isolated because of their religion. Even if they share the same religion as the indigenous people, they feel that it's not the same and that they can't be part of the societies. If they want to show their Muslim identity, they feel alienated. That's one of the reasons why, when they experience hate crimes, they don't go to the police. They keep it to themselves. At one point, when representatives of the minister of justice wanted to talk to the Muslim community about hate crimes, they came to me to help with outreach. I talked to the representatives of the mosque in Wilanow, who were so anxious that police officers wanted to pay a visit to the mosque. They thought that if the neighbors saw police officers surrounding the mosque, they would immediately think that the mosque was a dangerous place, that they were doing something bad and that's why the police were there. For many other Muslims, for Tatars or Turks, this is not a big issue. But Muslims from the Middle East or Indonesia, who more strongly identify themselves with the religion, have this perception. But this is not only specific to Poland. In other countries, you would have similar problems. For instance, in Moldova a couple years ago, there was a big issue around the registration of the Islamic community. According to the law on religion, in order to conduct religious ceremonies in communities, the religious community had to be registered. If they didn't get registered, it was actually a crime. The Muslim community wanted to be registered, but the minister of interior refused their application because it was made by Muslims with immigrant backgrounds - Muslims from the outside -- who were considered more extremist, even though they never committed any crime. After the refusal of their registration, they wanted to continue their usual community practices. But when they conducted Friday prayers, they were arrested and put in prison. This couldn't continue. So, the Moldovans who had converted and become Muslims were encouraged to apply for registration under a different organization, the Islamic League of Moldova. And their application was accepted. But there was a huge reaction from the Communist Party and from the Orthodox Church. They organized demonstrations in front of the main church, also in front of parliament. The government had to step back and reconsider the registration. In this way you can see how the conflict between "our" religion and the "outside" religion plays out. It doesn't help to promote any kind of tolerance. You can also see it in Western Europe in the rhetoric and discourse about how to create a European Islam. Of course, in many places in Eastern Europe, there are big indigenous Muslim populations - a Turkish minority in Greece and in Bulgaria, the community in Serbia in Sandjak, the Bosniak community in Bosnia, the Tatars in Ukraine, and all kinds of Muslim ethnic communities in Russia. Islamophobia gets all mixed up with chauvinism toward indigenous communities: anti-Turkish, anti-Bosniak, anti-Tatar elements. There are also racist elements mixed in with this. And it's all somehow linked to historic conflicts. Muslims in the region have been accused of helping the Ottomans during the invasion of the Balkans. They were treated as traitors. In Greece, anti-Turkish chauvinism is mixed with Islamophobia in a way to show how the Greeks were right when they were saying that Islam was a threat to their country and finally the West is recognizing their position. In the meantime, they also spread racism and xenophobia against immigrant communities, with neo-Nazi organizations physically attacking Pakistanis and Middle Eastern people. In Eastern Europe anti-Roma sentiment is also mixed in because many Roma people have Islamic background especially in Southeastern Europe. They are discriminated because they are Roma and because they are Muslims. Have there been hate crime cases here in Poland motivated by Islamophobia? Yes, there were some incidents. In Bialystok, this year, an Egyptian person was attacked with an axe. He was hospitalized. He had darker skin and looked like he might have been Muslim. You will see and hear this quite often. If you have darker skin and you come from the Middle East, people think that you are Muslim. There are incidents like this, but very few of them make headlines. You have to go to the Muslim community and you have to ask. Then they will tell you. But first you have to explain what a hate crime is. The understanding of hate crimes among Muslims is actually quite low. They think that only brutal attacks are hate crimes. They don't see that if you are harassed on the bus because you are wearing headscarf it's a hate crime. Or hateful graffiti. They wouldn't report it. Even if you ask. You need to talk with them and explain to them what hate crimes are and give some examples, and then you'll see that many incidents take place. Usually they don't take place in Warsaw. It's mostly in rural areas. Warsaw is becoming a bit more multicultural. The people here are getting used to people with different backgrounds. But still there are some places in Warsaw, like Praga, that are dangerous and you wouldn't go there if you're wearing a headscarf. I can give you a list of these incidents. This late September, we will have an annual human rights meeting, and Muslim organizations will organize a side event to discuss hate crimes and provide a more detailed picture. I read a brief description of an anti-mosque rally here in Warsaw that had strange organizing partners. One of the partners was a Buddhist organization. And they wee working with skinheads. To read the rest of the interview, click here. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Exploring The Delicate Strength Of Interfaith Friendships: Excerpt From 'If the Oceans Were Ink'

Below is an excerpt used with permission from author Carla Power’s If the Oceans Were Ink, which explores her friendship with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi. The two embark on a yearlong journey exploring the Quran, while simultaneously challenging stereotypes and coming into deeper awareness of their own identities. Not long after his lecture on Yusuf, Akram and I met in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for a lesson. We strode past the Greeks and Romans and skirted the Renaissance, heading straight for the Islamic collection. We passed two balding men straining to see a blue-and-white Iznik tile. A lithe young woman in jeans, earbuds firmly in her ears, gazed at the cypress on a frieze from Damascus. As we walked, something caught my eye. “Come,” I said to the Sheikh. “You’ve got to see this!” On a wall hung a set of Persian tiles decorated to illustrate “Yusuf and Zuleikha,” a poem by the Sufi poet Jami that was based on the Quran’s story of Yusuf. In lapis and turquoise, with touches of pink to set off the cool blues, some eighteenth-century Iranian artist had painted the women of Memphis, lounging on rugs and looking, amazed, at handsome Yusuf. I was ridiculously pleased to stumble upon this so soon after the Yusuf lecture, and to see it with the Sheikh. The tile hung a short walk from where he worked—what were the chances? To find an image based on the sura of Yusuf in the Ashmolean, that venerable British institution, seemed like some sort of cosmic nod. We stood there for a minute, and it felt urgent that he acknowledge it. For a secularist like me, the coincidence reinforced Akram’s lesson on the circle and the line. What prayer gave him, art gave me. Each reassured that no matter what space you find yourself in, even in this fractured world, there was a unity. The sign that you weren’t alone, the means of making a connection. I’d grown up trying to bridge my life in St. Louis with my worlds in Kabul or Cairo or Delhi. To make the world seem whole, I’d read Rudyard Kipling in Clayton, Missouri, and tales of Midwestern prairie girls on the road to Kandahar. Besides, the tiles were gorgeous. Look at Yusuf, I exclaimed, with that halo-disk illuminating his head! How the artist had managed to make him look stoic, but also shocked, with one eyebrow slightly raised? The bowls of fruit, the lounging women? Akram glanced at the tiles for a second. He nodded politely. He knew the poem they were based on, he said. And that was that. He turned away and made for a nearby bench, sitting down to begin the lesson. At first I wondered whether I’d upset him. I knew that like many Muslims, he preferred to avoid figurative art. Just now, getting lost looking for the Islamic art, we’d strode past a Michelangelo sketch and a row of Greek busts without slowing our steps; they might have been McDonald’s ads for all the attention he gave them. He was simply indifferent: unmoved by the art around him but willing to sit on a bench in the middle of it. Later, when I asked him whether I’d offended him, he’d assured me I hadn’t. It was simply that Muslims didn’t hold with images of prophets, he explained. “To depict them limits them,” he explained. “Out of respect for the prophets, we don’t like to limit them.” That upended my pat ideas of art’s power. For Akram, pictures stunted the imagination rather than stretched it. I felt deflated. Outflanked, somehow. Looking back on it, I wonder whether I’d been hoping, that day at the Ashmolean, for some sort of conversion from the Sheikh. Not a religious conversion, obviously. But I know I hoped he’d see the tile, or perhaps a Titian, and see, for a minute or two, its beauty. There was, I suspect, an element of Show and Tell in me, some need for approval, or if not that, for connection. The year had included endless amounts of hospitality and kindness from him, and boundless generosity with his time and expertise. But I suspect I wanted some mutual curiosity from him. Just for a second, I wanted him to take a step toward my worldview, as I’d done toward his. It wasn’t that I wanted him to change his outlook, just to acknowledge the beauty of mine. In truth, he had already endorsed many of my values simply by showing up at the Ashmolean. By the standards of Uttar Pradeshi Muslim purdah, just agreeing to my solo lessons was a major cultural leap. Born in a house hold where brothers and sisters didn’t talk to one another, he was now meeting a woman—a nonbeliever, no less—in an art museum. Was our conversation not my precious pluralism in action? With exquisite manners, the Sheikh said as much when I asked him whether there were elements of Western culture that might shock his younger self. “For example, I’m sitting here with you now,” he said. “If someone sees in Nadwah that I am sitting with you, they cannot imagine it! An alim with a woman!” In the most polite way, he was saying: “I’m here, aren’t I?” We were talking. About death. And sex. And marriage. Nature. What it means to be human. That we didn’t always agree, or that he didn’t fall into raptures over Western civilization on our way to the Islamic gallery—what of it? Surely he had offered me much more than a few shared seconds in front of a pretty bit of art. When the novelist Salman Rushdie was living under a death threat issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini for alleged blasphemy against Islam, Rushdie wrote of literature as a sacred space, remaining “the one place in any society where . . . we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.” There were no voices in the Quran, just a single, omnipresent one. Nor, despite passages of exquisite power and beauty, was the Quran literature. But for the Sheikh, the Quran was as infinite as a novelist deems literature to be. For me, reading the Quran with Akram allowed us to talk, if not about “everything in every possible way,” then at least about far more than I ever thought possible. At the start of these lessons, I’d known of the dazzling possibilities of Islamic culture to embrace points of view like my own. But I’d expected to find them among Muslim progressives, not with a conservative madrasa scholar. The lesson that followed, as we sat on the wooden museum bench surrounded by fragments of Muslim cultures, reminded me how tricky these boundary crossings could be. We were talking of the widespread practice in many Muslim societies of marrying girls young. Predictably, I’d railed against it. What about education? Personal choice? Hopes for a career? The usual, in short. The Sheikh listened—and then suggested I take a look at Western civilization. One had to look back only three hundred years or so in Europe’s history, back before the Industrial Revolution, to find early marriages. No public schools, or truant authorities, or Rights of the Child manifesto, or underage statutes. My outrage may have burned, but it cooled slightly after Akram reminded me that Western absolutes were made, not born. What I take as Truth is built on a history of revolutions— political, industrial, and personal. A girl’s right to school and a childhood weren’t fixtures of the landscape, like a boulder or an ocean. They had to be fought for, and then created. It was bracing, this reminder of my own culture as a living tradition, built by framing and reframing the norms of what justice means. “When we grow up in a certain culture, a certain context, the mind is so fixed that we cannot think in any other,” the Sheikh observed, picking up his coat. “It is very hard to see the whole situation.” Having gently pointed out the girders holding up Western morality, he left for evening prayers. I sat for a moment on the bench in that museum, surrounded by all manner of Islamic objects. A twelfth-century turquoise bowl from Central Asia. An Iznik tile painted in russet and lapis. An Egyptian mosque lamp. When Akram left, I felt oddly bereft. He’d gone to his mosque, and I was left, like my father before me, to admire the beauty of Islamic cultures without enjoying the full expanse of belief. Only nearing the end of our lessons did I recognize the irony of the year’s project. Studying the Sheikh’s faith had allowed me to practice mine. Our lessons were rites paying tribute to my belief that to be fully human is to try to understand others. Had he been entirely convinced of my worldview, or me of his, we would have risked destroying the fragile ecosystem of our friendship, made richer and stranger by our differences. For if understanding difference is among my own key values, it is also a Quranic one. Only through diversity, says the Quran, can you truly learn the shape and heft of your own humanity: O humankind, We created you from a male and a female, and We made you races and tribes for you to get to know each other. (49:13) And also to know ourselves. Without a year trying to see the world from Akram’s vantage, I wouldn’t be able to make out the contours of my own. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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By destroying churches and relics, ISIS is claiming that the Prophet Mohammad was wrong in interpreting Koran and they are right

ISIS yesterday destroyed an ancient Christian monastery which has been described as the equivalent of Canterbury Cathedral. Just weeks earlier it raided Mosul Museum and filmed themselves destroying all the relics on show, including priceless, irreplaceable Assyrian statues. This is a throwback to the infamous episode of when the Taliban destroyed the ancient great Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001. And the rationalisation is the same: in typical Wahhabi-inspired interpretation, any cultural artefact that is either culturally foreign or is somehow related to a sacred theme is a threat to a "good Muslim" because that "good" and "pure" Muslim will automatically be tempted into the unforgivable sin of polytheism. To the point where there are influential elements in the Wahhabi establishment that want to destroy the tomb of the Prophet himself. This is obvious stupidity. It also betrays a paradoxical lack of faith in the strength of their own faith. I for one cannot quite see how a few statues of Assyrian cherubs and kings is likely to rekindle the cult of Ishtar. I would in fact argue Islam itself prohibits this kind of senseless vandalism. Indeed, by destroying relics of Mosul ISIS is actually committing a blasphemy ("shirk"). Many of these relics have existed before the days of the Prophet Muhammad. Not only did the Prophet and the Salaf (the three generations of Muslims that lived after the time of Muhammad, and are believed to be the most righteous) preserve many such artefacts and relics in their own time, but almost all Muslim rulers and scholars of the past up until the advent of Wahhabism also maintained them. Scholars I have spoken to say this new attitude of destruction is, ironically, an unsanctioned innovation and thus a form of shirk. In effect, ISIS/Taliban/Wahhabis and similarly inspired vandals are claiming they are more enlightened that the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, his immediate successors and all previous Muslim rulers and scholars. According to them, all previous Muslims including the Prophet himself were essentially wrong and their own interpretation of what counts as polytheism and what can inspire it is correct. So the Prophet was wrong, or naïve in his reading of the Quran, but have no fear, 26-year old Mohammed from London is going to correct this error, with his eminent insights after his long and arduous Islamic studies in... Information Systems. Now it is certainly true that the Prophet Muhammad did destroy the pagan idols in the Kabaa. But the difference is that these idols were actually being directly worshipped by people at the time, and the cults of these gods posed a threat to the Muslim community. Whereas no one is worshipping the relics in the museum. Just like no Muslims had worshipped the statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan. Indeed, in the past, many Islamic scholars actively encouraged the preservation of great monuments and relics of civilisation, regardless of the fact that they were pre-Islamic. For example, in Egypt, the pyramids and the Sphinx were actively preserved as a reminder of a great civilization that once dominated the land. That such a civilisation could be swept away and swallowed by the sand is also an enlightening Islamic moral: the monuments were a reminder that the Will of God transcends the shifts of history. And still it remains a matter of historical fact that in the Golden Age of the Caliphate, the period of history that the ISIS thugs purport to "re-enact", Islam was an open, accommodating culture, not just eager, but hungry to learn as much as there was to know about the world and its cultures, its religions, its monuments. The Caliphs, the true Caliphs, not the obscure "scholar" at the top of ISIS, did not order monuments to be destroyed or books to be burnt. They ordered monuments to be preserved, or even brought to Islam, and books, from all over the world, from Hindu pagans, from Egyptian Copts, from Greek Atheists to be translated into Arabic. When they did this, Islam was the pinnacle of civilisation. But what ISIS preaches is the exact opposite. Dr Azeem Ibrahim is an International Security Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute US Army War College

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Sorting Out Our Bookshelves

As Muslims, our initial and understandable response to the atrocities committed in the name of our religion is disbelief, outrage and a natural instinct to distance ourselves from their perpetrators. "These barbaric acts", "this 'Jihadi John'" -- the notorious executioner of ISIS hostages, recently identified as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi -- "have nothing to do with Islam," we exclaim. While understandable, this attitude is dubious intellectually and altogether irresponsible. Would anyone agree with the notion that the crusades had "nothing to do" with Christianity? In truth, far too many among us appear to feel more indignant about ultimately meaningless caricatures published in a newspaper than about the abominable caricature that is being made of our religion by the likes of ISIS and Boko Haram. And while social and economic issues, or mistreatment by law enforcement agencies, may play a part in the radicalization of our youths, as it seems they might have in the case of Mr. Emwazi, they fall way short from explaining it altogether. Fortunately, an increasing number of Muslims are saying "Medina, Cairo, we have a problem" and calling for reform. But just what is meant by that term? A renovation of Islamic thought and a fresh push for the re-interpretation (ijtihâd) of sacred texts are, of course, absolutely necessary. Until they are seriously undertaken, Muslims will remain hostage to literal, obsolete readings of our sacred texts. Freedom, equal rights for all citizens, rule of law, universal suffrage, accountability and separation of power (State and religion) are our principles as Muslims of the twenty-first century. With those principles in mind, let us recall the words of the world-renowned Pakistani scholar Muhammad Khalid Masud: "Muslim jurists in the past were quite aware of the constant need to reconcile contradictions between social and legal norms. They continuously adjusted laws to bring them in line with the customs and norms of the people. The normative basis of the institutions and concepts such as family, property, rights, responsibility, criminality, civil obedience, social order, religiosity, international relations, war, peace, and citizenship have changed significantly over the last two centuries." And then get down to work. But interpretation alone will not be enough. We need to take a long, hard and honest look at the texts that are part of the core curriculum of our faith's most prestigious learning centers. The above-mentioned claim that violent acts of terror have "nothing to do with Islam" needs to be contrasted with the reverence that some of our most distinguished and respected scholars show for such books as Min Haj el Talibin by the renowned jurist consul Araf el dine el Nawawi, which recommends stoning adulterers or Es sarim el maslul ala chatim el rasul by Ibn Taymiyya, or Taqi al-Din al-Subki's Es seyf el maslul ala men sabba al rasul, which can both be translated roughly as "The sword is drawn against that one who speaks ill of the Prophet." The very precise prescriptions they contain regarding how to punish blasphemy, apostasy or adultery is the basis not just for ISIS' and Boko Haram's claim that their brand of Islam is nothing more than very rigorous, but for that of many mainstream conservative Muslim states. To be sure, many peoples have been persecuted, enslaved or killed in the name of Christ over the centuries. Bartholomé de las Casas, in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, chronicled the atrocities committed against the indigenous population by the Spanish in the first decades of colonization of the West Indies, only to argue that the natives were human and therefore should not be killed or enslaved... contrary to Africans. QED. Yet since then, slowly but surely, religious reform and the values of enlightenment have enabled Christians to emancipate themselves from such practices. At the turn of the twentieth century, the French "intellectual" Joseph de Gobineau's essay on the inequality of human races was considered "science" by many a conservative in Europe. It has since made its way to the "history" or "anthropology" shelves of libraries. It is time significant portions of classic Islamic curricula follow the same path. More generally, isn't it time we Muslims, who rightly like to think of our Prophet as an avant-gardist, reclaim our role as modernizers of cultural and social norms? We need to look at the way some in our communities, such as the British advocacy organization CAGE, which dealt extensively with Mr. Emwazi, are essentially encouraging our youths to think of themselves as victims, telling them that it's because of police brutality, the Jews, the U.S., Israel, poverty, or even good old "society" that he morphed into "Jihadi John." Instead of focusing on our religion's original, universal ideals of mercy, freedom and justice, many of us have become fond of self-victimization and conspiracy theories while immersing ourselves in arguments about the right means (and garb) to achieve those ideals. Our decadence stems precisely from this confusion among so many of us between the ends and the means of Islam, from our collective failure to maintain the initial convergence between our faith and morality, the very basis of a healthy conscience: spirituality. Religion without such moral ethos is meaningless. And without meaning, it surely becomes pointless. Isn't it time, more broadly, that we began a frank discussion about where religion ends and where culture begins? Of course, the two are intertwined, but if a Moroccan Muslim is not inferior to one from Saudi, nor superior to one from Belgium, is it not safe to assume that religion is what they have in common in their understanding and practice of Islam, while culture (clothing, relation to their respective King, etc.) constitutes the rest? Much of the conservatism associated with Islam nowadays can actually be dated to pre-Islamic Bedouin customs that our Prophet, a true innovator, fought to overthrow. Many of the clichés and conspiracy theories popular among our youths come straight from the twisted, anti-Western worldview of many governments in the Arab world. Ours is a day and age in which three out of four Muslims are non Arab; one in which only two of the twenty-two nations of the Arab League can claim to be functioning democracies; one in which four times as many books are translated into Greek (circa 10m speakers) than into Arabic (circa 350m speakers). Shouldn't we acknowledge that the historical arabocentrism of our religion has become a liability and that non-Arab Muslims are no less legitimate and respectable than Arab ones? Those among us who would have the world believe that phallocratic "customs" such as the male guardian system, forbidding women from driving, or the imposition of the niqab are ontologically "Islamic" need to be told first and foremost by other Muslims: they simply aren't so. Dr. Adnan Ibrahim, Professor of Philosophy at Vienna University, Imam at the al Shurah Mosque. Felix Marquardt, co-founder of the Global Forum for Islamic Reform. Mohamed Bajrafil, Doctor in Linguistics, Imam at the Mosque of Ivry-sur-Seine.

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The Charlie Hebdo Murders: An Attack on Religious Libery, Not Free Expression

The monstrous slaughter at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo brought hundreds of thousands of marchers and numerous world leaders onto the streets of Paris to support free expression. But the attacks really were not about freedom of speech. Rather, the killings demonstrated how the destructive phenomenon of religious persecution is spreading from Third World dictatorships to First World democracies. Religious minorities long have faced murder and prison around the world. Now the freedom not to believe by majorities in Western democracies is under attack. Charlie Hebdo went out of its way to offend. That isn't my style or taste. The magazine might have exhibited poor judgment. In fact, Charles Wilson of the University of Warwick denounced "free-speech fundamentalism." However, there is no "but" to free expression, which goes to the very essence of the human person. While good judgment tells us not to express every thought we have, as moral agents responsible for our actions we must be free to assess the world and express ourselves in vibrant public debate. Restricting opinion--whether through vigilante violence or increasingly common "hate speech laws," ironically used by the French government both before and after the murders to stifle criticism of Islam--necessarily limits inquiry, and thus the pursuit of truth. For religion there is no greater affront than to inhibit people's search for the transcendent and liberty to respond, yay or nay, to God's call. The angrier the response to a claim or opinion, the more obviously it challenges received truths and forces rethinking of settled views. The murderous attack on the staff at Charlie Hebdo was an attempt to silence an aspect of this search. The paper's often insulting work might not be an effective way to convince Muslims (or Christians, who also suffered the publication's slings and arrows) to reconsider their views. Indeed, the reaction to such attacks more often is reflexively defensive than expansively inquiring. However, serious belief must be capable of withstanding even the most offensive assault. Early Christians famously faced lions in the Roman Coliseum. Surely believers today should be able to confront insulting cartoons. Western governments must protect the liberties of their peoples. That includes not overreacting by expanding the unconstrained powers of the surveillance state, the first response of many officials to terrorism. Even worse is Washington's inclination to bomb, invade, or occupy other nations at will. Nor should members any group, Muslim or other, be treated as enemies. However, the problem of violent religious intolerance is almost uniquely Muslim. It took Christianity hundreds of years but the faithful finally learned to stop killing over spiritual differences. Israel should be criticized as a nation state, not a spiritual representation of the globally dispersed Jewish people. Vicious strains of Buddhism and Hinduism operate in Sri Lanka and India, respectively, but are localized phenomena which rarely reach beyond their own societies. In contrast, Islamic persecution is global. In most countries in which Muslims constitute a majority religious minorities suffer discrimination and persecution. The rare exceptions are nations such as Kuwait and Turkey, in which Christian churches generally are free to operate and Christian believers generally do not face private violence. Even in these nations there are serious problems and limits--on the right to proselytize in Kuwait, for instance, and restrictions on the Orthodox Church in Turkey and rising anti-semitism. One can argue why Islamic states so often brutally mistreat their most vulnerable citizens, but there is no disguising reality. If you are a Baha'i, Jew, Ahmadi, Christian, Yazidi, Hindu, wrong kind of Muslim, or atheist you likely will find life always difficult and often threatening in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Sudan, Yemen, Maldives, Syria, and others. The other worst persecutors--North Korea typically tops the global list, with Eritrea and the Central Asians also ranked high--are totalitarian/authoritarian rather than Christian. The official religion in Pyongyang is relentlessly secular; the only god is the state or dictator. Some Muslims point to blowback from promiscuous U.S. intervention. Washington has supported dictators, harmed innocents, and wrecked societies throughout the Islamic world. However, these are acts of a nation state, not a religious faith. And while that behavior might explain (though not justify, since nothing warrants the murder of civilians) attacks on U.S. targets, it does not illuminate why Pakistani mobs burn to death Pakistani Christians, Egyptian mobs wreck Egyptian Copts' homes, and Indonesian mobs torch Indonesian Christian churches. The thugs who cut down a dozen Charlie Hebdo are the international descendants of those who murder alleged blasphemers and apostates in Muslim nations. Laws against blasphemy once were common in the West, and persist in a few nations--some, ironically, represented by government leaders who marched in Paris--and even a couple of American states, but are rarely used. However, blasphemy laws are actively enforced throughout the Muslim world. The irony is that where Islam is strongest, with belief by overwhelming popular majorities and support from authoritarian state authorities, the slightest perceived criticism of the dominant faith can result in prison or death. That suggests lack of confidence in the truth of Islam and fear of free inquiry by free minds. In March the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a special report entitled "Prisoners of Belief: Individuals Jailed Under Blasphemy Laws." Recent victims of the ongoing attack on free expression include people from Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Turkey. (Also in Greece, where the Orthodox Church remains tied to the state.) On Friday Saudi blogger Raif Badawi received the first 50 of 1000 lashes for his "crime"; he also faces ten years in prison. Despite hopes for expanded individual liberty as a result of the Arab Spring, revolutionary governments in both Egypt and Tunisia charged citizens with blasphemy. In 2012 Kuwait's popularly elected Assembly voted to impose the death penalty on Muslims convicted of blasphemy; the Emir blocked the legislation. USCIRF commissioners Zuhdi Jasser and Katrina Lantos Swett warned: "Rather than giving rise to greater individual liberty, this trend could turn the Arab Spring into a repressive winter, with forces of intolerance and tyranny dashing hopes for genuine freedom and liberal democracy." Nowhere are blasphemy laws more used and abused than in Pakistan. Nearly 1000 people have been charged with the offense over the last three decades. A couple years ago the authorities prosecuted a mentally handicapped 12-year-old Christian girl, before dismissing the case due to the international outcry. Wife and mother Asia Bibi currently faces death because she defended her Christian beliefs to fellow berry pickers who were pressuring her to convert to Islam. In its report USCIRF explained how the law encourages abuse: "The so-called crime carries the death penalty or life in prison, does not require proof of intent or evidence to be presented after allegations are made, and does not include penalties for false allegations." Judges prefer not to hear evidence, since doing so could be construed as blasphemy. A claim usually is sufficient to send someone to prison, making the law a common weapon in personal and business disputes. Non-Muslims are peculiarly vulnerable. Observed the Commission: "The country's blasphemy laws, used predominantly in Punjab province, but also nationwide, target members of religious minority communities and dissenting Muslims and frequently result in imprisonment." The group Freedom House also studied the issue, concluding that "it is clear that Pakistan's blasphemy laws are used politically and applied disproportionately to non-Muslims. Although many other countries have laws against blasphemy, the situation in Pakistan is unique in its severity and its particular effects on religious minorities." Many people do not reach trial: mobs have killed more than 50 people charged with the offense. And thugs like those who gunned down the Charlie Hebdo staffers have murdered judges who acquitted defendants, attorneys who represented those accused, and politicians who proposed reforming the laws. The killers have been widely applauded, including by other Pakistani lawyers. A pamphlet circulated after the murder of human rights attorney Rashid Rehman earlier this year announced that he met his "rightful end." Unsurprisingly, such violent intolerance inhibits freedom of expression involving much more than technical "blasphemy." Pakistan already is scary, an unstable nuclear state which has backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and violent Islamist radicals in India. Yet, warned Freedom House, "blasphemy laws foster an environment of intolerance and impunity, and lead to violations of a broad range of human rights, including the obvious rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion, as well as freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; the right to due process and a fair trial; freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and the right to life and security of the person." Self-censorship toward Islam is evident in many Western nations, even where activists and publications enthusiastically lampoon other religions. The Paris killings are likely to reinforce such fears. But that is not enough for some Muslim states. Governments which persecute their own people have campaigned at the United Nations against the so-called defamation of religion. These states jail and kill, or stand by as mobs brutalize and murder, members of minority faiths. Then the governments complain of verbal criticism of Islam elsewhere and push to restrict freedom of expression in lands which their own laws do not reach. There isn't much Washington can do to protect liberty in other countries, though curbing counterproductive military intervention would help reduce some antagonisms. However, the U.S. government must insist that the liberties of Americans are non-negotiable and will be defended. It might be imprudent to offend, but the right to do so is fundamental to a free society. More broadly, the Charlie Hebdo murders should remind policymakers that religious liberty is not an afterthought, an esoteric principle with little practical impact. Instead, the refusal of other states to respect freedom of conscience, indeed, their willingness to routinely violate this most basic liberty, should act as the clichéd canary in the mine. A government which refuses to protect individuals in exploring the transcendent is more likely to leave other essential liberties unprotected. Societies which do not acknowledge the importance of the life and dignity of the human person, and especially the right to believe differently, are more likely to spawn violence directed against free societies elsewhere. Like in Paris. Intolerant and violent currents influence some Muslim states and threaten to dominate others. In Paris we again saw how these forces can impact the rest of us. Better security is only part of the answer. Much depends on people in Muslim-majority nations, where religious persecution today is at its worst, coming to peacefully accept those who believe differently both at home and abroad. This post originally appeared on Forbes online.

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Far-Right Blame Game Distracts From France's Underlying Divisions

The streets of France rang with cries for unity this weekend, as more than 4 million people marched in a defiant response to three days of terror that left 17 people dead. French officials said Sunday's march in Paris was the largest in the nation's recent history. "National unity is vital at such a time, because the plans of the terrorists go beyond violence and seek to sow fear," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said last week, amid the deadly attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and subsequent twin hostage crisis. Yet for all the emphasis on unity, the attacks have also brought renewed attention to the widening social and political divides in France. As the violence was perpetrated by three French men with immigrant parents and a violent interpretation of Islam, far-right parties across Europe have argued that they've been proven right about the threats posed by Islamic extremism and immigration. "I have been warning of the danger of Muslim fundamentalism in our country for years," said Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front party, in the wake of the attacks. Le Pen's deputy, Florian Philippot, told French radio: "Anyone who says Islamist radicalism has nothing to do with immigration is living on another planet." Meanwhile, the political opponents of far-right parties across Europe have accused those parties of exploiting the attack to sow fear between communities. Though French society does, indeed, have deepening schisms, many analysts say this has little to do with the dire warnings of the far right. The hard-liners' focus on religious differences can obscure the country's underlying socio-economic divisions, Anand Menon, a professor of West European Politics at King's College London, told The WorldPost. France's economic decline after the 2008 financial crisis has reinforced the gulf between the employed, who have relatively generous social benefits, and the growing numbers of unemployed, especially among youth and minorities. "There is a growing division between the economic insiders and outsiders," Menon told The WorldPost. "The outsiders include a disproportionate number of North Africans living in the horrendous suburbs of Paris -- which are almost like another country." The banlieues, or suburbs, of Paris are home to many impoverished immigrant communities, and have high levels of unemployment and crime. The banlieues erupted into major riots in the 1980s and again in 2005. "We have a terrible problem in France of disenfranchised young people, with no opportunities," Olivier Roy, an expert in political Islam, told The New York Times last week. "Many of them start off in petty delinquency, but for some of them radical Islam is a way to find a second life." Meanwhile, the National Front has tapped into discontent over those same economic disparities, but blames immigration for making the problem worse (an argument of which many economists are skeptical). A significant economic divide exists between rural and urban France, and last year, Le Pen made a point of touring impoverished rural areas, which she labelled "forgotten France," according to the BBC. The party's popularity has surged. In France, as in other European countries, politicians and the media frequently treat Muslims and immigrants as one and the same. Yet most immigrants to France are not from Muslim-majority countries. Nearly half of new immigrants to France in 2012 were Europeans, according to the French national statistics agency INSEE. The agency notes that the number of new immigrants to France was stable between 2004 to 2009 and rose between 2009 and 2012, mainly due to an influx of Europeans after the financial crisis. While France does not keep official statistics on religious affiliation, statistics indicate that a growing number of French Muslims are also French citizens. The French Muslim population is estimated to be the largest in Western Europe -- approximately 7.5 percent of the population, compared to an estimated 5 percent in Germany and the United Kingdom. French Muslims are predominantly North African, the descendants of migrants from former French colonial territories. By contrast, Britain's Muslim population is historically from South Asia, reflecting the country's own colonial past, and Germany has a greater proportion of guest workers from Turkey. Such nuances get lost, though, when political leaders do things like comparing Muslim immigration to the Nazi occupation of France, or saying that the onus is on Muslims to prove that "you can be French and Muslim and still respect secular rules." Muslim communities across Europe are grappling with a number of serious problems, including radicalization by extremist groups and populist backlash against Islam. France is reported to have the greatest number of Muslims going to fight alongside extremist groups in Syria, although the percentage of French Muslims who have gone off for that reason is about the same as the percentages in the U.K. and the Netherlands, according to one estimate by CNN. At the same time, far-right groups are growing in visibility and popularity across Europe, and attacks against French Muslims are on the rise. The uptick in racist violence has not only targeted Muslims. France also has Europe's largest Jewish population, and many French Jews fear that a surge of anti-Semitic attacks is in the offing. Violence against Roma communities has also escalated in recent years. Nicholas Dungan, a senior fellow and France expert at the Atlantic Council, argues that the root cause of rising racism is a general malaise about the country's prospects. "If you look don't think things will get better, you look to blame someone else," he told The WorldPost. "France has been in a state of drift for some time now, and that drift has led to divisions." Perhaps surprisingly, the people of France have a relatively high opinion of the Muslims in their country, according to a Pew survey in March 2014. Pew found that 72 percent of the French regard French Muslims favorably -- a higher percentage than found in Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland, Germany or the U.K. At the same time, a similar percentage of French respondents -- 74 percent -- believe that Islam is incompatible with French values, according to an IPSOS survey in 2013. Dungan argues that there is no contradiction between these statistics. "French people are politically sophisticated enough to make a distinction between Muslims and fundamentalists," he said. "There is a lot of consistency in saying, 'We believe that Muslims are perfectly capable of being good members of society, but we don't think the values of Islam' -- and they're likely thinking of extreme examples -- 'fit with our values,'" he said. This is reflective of wider political debates in France about the role of religion. Historically, France has drawn a strict separation between private religious practice and the secular public sphere. This has caused tensions with religious communities -- for example, many Muslims are displeased about recent bans on in schools and face veils in public. French national identity is particularly rooted in the founding values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Dungan argues that France is beset by an identity crisis after struggling to articulate these values in the modern era, noting a failure of political leadership, economic problems and a sense that France has faded on the world stage. "If France does not excel, France does not exist," he remarked, characterizing French national pride. Many commentators have warned of the risk of further polarization following last week's killings. "The main impact may be to use the attacks as an excuse to blame Islam and immigration for broad anxieties about where things are going in Europe today," warned John R. Bowen, sociocultural anthropologist at Washington University St. Louis, in a school publication. Others, though, are more optimistic. Several Parisians told the Financial Times that they hope the attack will provide an opportunity to heal the country's divisions. And Dungan believes that is already happening. Values are again at the center of national debate and the crowds on the streets show how deeply they are shared. "Until now, the National Front was able to occupy an empty political space," he said. "But now people have realized that you don't need to vote for the far right in order to be patriotic."

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