With an increase in misconceptions about Islam following terrorist attacks in Paris, a former imam at American University in Washington said Muslims need to relearn their faith and should not defend Islamic history.
“Defending Islam is not defending Islamic history. The Ottomans were not angels. The Umayyads were not angels. The Abbasids were not angels. You shouldn’t defend Islamic history,” Fadel Solimon, who is a member of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, said in response to a question about how to defend Islam when critics argued that the Holy Quran advocated the conquering of lands and forceful conversion of non-Muslims.
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The young woman who had posed the question then referred to some verses in the Holy Quran which, in her opinion, ordered Muslims to spread Islam through the expansion of borders. “But the verses are there. They are in the Quran. Didn’t empires like the Ottoman Empire spread like that?”
“No, that’s not true, that’s not true,” interjected Solimon, and continued, “The Quran simply says if a neighbouring country violates a peace agreement, or they attack you, you can defend yourself. ... It does not teach you to conquer for wealth, but to remove oppression, to defend the weak.”
Solimon, who was speaking at a workshop in Istanbul which was organised by the Turkey-based Center for Cross-Cultural Communication, has spent more than a decade training Muslims on interfaith outreach. The workshop aims to train volunteers on how to respond to questions tourists ask at Istanbul’s most famous landmarks, such as the ancient Suleymaniye Mosque.
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Solimon says his aim to change the traditional understanding of Islam and modernity. “People think I do this just to enlighten non-Muslims, but actually my hidden goal is to enlighten Muslim youth and strengthen their faith. If you tell them come to a workshop to strengthen your faith, they will not come, but if you tell them to come to a workshop and learn how to talk about Islam to non-Muslims, they come,” he said.
The scholar also spoke about a few of the most controversial topics in the Muslim community – homosexuality and corporal punishment. “Homosexuals can be Muslims but to actually act on their desires by committing sodomy is a sin. Stoning and amputation are valid punishments under Shariah but for most of Islamic history they were never applied because rulers and scholars understood the judicial system to be flawed, and the risk of punishing innocents was too great.”
Giving the example of a Danish convert, Murad Storm, a former extremist who abandoned Islam and then helped US and European intelligence agencies track down an al Qaeda terrorist in Yemen, Solimon said extremism was usually the first step towards leaving the religion.
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He recounted how Storm had confronted him at a 2005 lecture about why 9/11 was not justified in Islam. “When people like (Storm) hear criticism of Islam for the first time, they are not able to handle it,” said Solimon. “They become violent and try to defend what they think is Islam. (Eventually) they actually leave Islam.”
In 2010, Solimon had also refuted former al Qaeda spokesperson Anwar al Awlaki, whom he knew from their time in the US together. Awlaki, a Yemeni-American, was a senior recruiter for the terrorist group and had issued a video calling for Muslims to kill all Americans, anywhere.
“He justified terrorism,” said Solimon. “And I couldn’t stay silent.”
This article originally appeared on Washington Post.
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