{"id":2235,"date":"2007-03-07T11:04:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/03\/07\/muslims-against-jihad\/"},"modified":"2007-03-07T11:04:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-07T16:04:00","slug":"muslims-against-jihad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/03\/muslims-against-jihad\/","title":{"rendered":"Muslims Against Jihad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/Articles\/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27260\">FrontPageMagazine.com<\/a> Walid Phares March 7, 2007<\/p>\n<p>Where are the Muslim moderates? <\/p>\n<p>That is a question that many in the West have been asking in recent years. Now it\u2019s possible to provide an answer: They\u2019re in St. Petersburg, Florida. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Between March 4 and March 7, the city is hosting the first ever Secular Islam Summit. Organized by the Center for Inquiry Transnational, an organization that promotes \u201cscience, reason, free inquiry,\u201d as well as countless activists, the conference features more than two dozen speakers and about two hundred participants with varying religious and political backgrounds and nationalities. It is among the first conferences to bring together Muslim intellectuals for the purpose of discussing the threat of Islamic jihadism and finding secular and liberal expressions of Islam.<\/p>\n<p>The opening remarks of the conference were given by two famous Western-based Muslim dissidents. First to speak was Ibn Warraq, the author of several volumes on secular Islam. In his sophisticated introduction to the Islamic \u201cintellectual movement,\u201d he laid out the philosophical basis for a full separation between religion and state in the Muslim world. Advocating universal values and a global reform of education, he also called for regime change in many countries, including in Iran, encouraged the formation of organizations to promote human rights in the Islamic world, and, in an interesting and twist, called on reformists to \u201ctake Mullahs to courts for issuing fatwas.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Notably, Ibn Warraq made no attempt to justify or rationalize Islamic extremism. Considering that oft-asked question &#8212; \u201cWhy do they hate us?\u201d &#8212; he offered an unambiguous answer: \u201cThey hate us because they were taught to do so.\u201d Although Ibn Warraq said that he has already \u201cleft\u201d Islam, his call for Muslim societies to undertake religious reform was compelling and urgent. <\/p>\n<p>. . . <a href=\"http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/Articles\/ReadArticle.asp?ID=27260\">more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>FrontPageMagazine.com Walid Phares March 7, 2007 Where are the Muslim moderates? That is a question that many in the West have been asking in recent years. Now it\u2019s possible to provide an answer: They\u2019re in St. Petersburg, Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}