"Of all the questions you might want to ask / about angels, the only one you ever hear / is how many can dance on the head of a pin." -- Billy Collins, bio {Others' quotes}

3.26.2011

Why This Man Is Scary To Islamophobes

... because he's not frightening. He's an American-born Orthodox Muslim cleric whose AlMaghrib Institute has classes, seminars and video presentations.
He is confident to a fault, often trailing a sentence with “God protect me from arrogance.” In class, he can be staid and professorial, with flashes of frivolity. He once implored students to “make love, not jihad.” 
... 
Qadhi said he fell down a slippery slope where criticism of Israel gave way to attacks on Jews. Beneath the vitriol, he said, was a sense of victimization — that non-Muslims were to blame for the afflictions of the Muslim world. “When you’re young and naïve, it’s easier to fall prey to such things,” said Qadhi, who publicly recanted years later. Last August, he joined a delegation of American imams and rabbis on a visit to the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps, which he said left him “sick” and more embarrassed by his Hitler remarks.
....
In August 2006, at a meeting for Muslim leaders in Houston, he walked up to Daniel W. Sutherland, a Homeland Security official. “Hi, I’m a pacifist Salafi,” Qadhi said to him. Looking stunned, Sutherland sat and talked with Qadhi for more than an hour.
....
Qadhi rose before a crowd of thousands in Elizabeth, N.J., to finally speak about Awlaki. “I am against this preacher when he tells our youth to become militant against this country while being citizens to this country,” 
....
While he unequivocally denounces violence against civilians, he believes Muslims have the right to defend themselves from attack. But he says “offensive jihad”— the spread of the Islamic state by force — is permissible only when ordered by a legitimate caliph, or global Muslim ruler, which is nonexistent in today’s world.

Yasir Qadhi's blog: MuslimMatters.org; his site on issues of jihad: The JWord.org
SOURCE: By Andrea Elliot in the NYTimes Magazine; see her Pulitzer Prize-winning 3-part series from 2006

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