Note from Robert Spencer:
A press release from the UN Commission on Human Rights, Geneva: GENEVA: The Association of World Citizens, the Association for World Education and the International Humanist and Ethical Union will sponsor a discussion on “Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion and Belief,” at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Palais des Nations, Gate 40, Room XXI, on Wed, April 7, from 1:15 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. A 3:30 p.m. press conference at the UN Press Room 2 will follow.

Speakers will include Ibn Warraq, a secularist Muslim intellectual; Younas Sheikh, a Pakistani doctor, human rights and peace activist; Shafique Keshavjee, a Swiss pastor and author; and Paul Cook, a representative of the Barnabas Fund (UK).

His other books are anthologies of scholarly writings, together with his own lucid, meticulous, and enlightening introductory essays and appendices: The Quest for the Historical Muhammad), What the Koran Really Says, and The Origins of the Koran. His articles, not all of which can be found at his website (www.secularislam.org), deserve to be read. One of the most amusing is his dismemberment of the "intellectual thug" Edward Said; even more important is his essay on what a real reformation in Islam would entail. This is important, given that an "Islamic reformation" seems to be the pet project, of breezy young American law students, unaware both of the near-impossibility of its being achieved, even by Muslims (for if it could have been achieved, it would have been, in the many centuries of trying, by perfectly intelligent Muslims who undestood what needed to be done but kept coming up against the wall of text, the reality of immutable doctrine)and what such a reformation would entail. Ibn Warraq, who as a child attended a madrasa, and who understands the effect of Islamic teachings from within, is properly skeptical.

Admirers of assorted "reformers" of Islam -- Soroush or Noah Feldman or others -- still in the afterglow of their year of teaching at Harvard Divinity School, or giddy with expectation for their coming year at Yale Law School (and if the little matter of reforming Islam can't be achieved, oh well -- perhaps as a consolation prize someone can be awarded tenure instead), would do better by immersing themselves in Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye'or, Reza Afshari, Ali Sina, and many others, including the scholars who can be easily retrieved from the CD-Rom of the Index Islamicus.

The idea that Westerners can "create the conditions that will empower the reformers" to achieve the "reformation" that has eluded Islam for 1350 years, as the result of undertakings akin to term projects by a handful of bright American enthusiasts beavering away, almost all of them non-Muslims (on the model of the young American academic's much-publicized contribution to "re-writing the Iraqi Constitution" as if that will matter in the slightest) is startling. And more recently, at least one Muslim scholar now entrenched at an American law school appears to believe, or to want her audience to believe, that somehow the Qur'an can be treated like the American Constitution, and she will be the Chief Justice Marshall of her day ("It is a Qur'an we are expounding..."). No, the Qur'an is not the Constitution, still less the hadith and the sira. Back to the old drawing board -- preferably the one that Ataturk used.

One would do better to read, and re-read, Ibn Warraq. And to his books, those of Reza Afshari (on human rights and Islam), of Bat Ye'or (on the institution of dhimmitude), and of others , who have a less sanguine view, informed by long study, of Islam's compatibility with human rights.

In any case, the "Islamic reformation" project never gets to the main problem: the uncompromising hostility which is prescribedbetween dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, until the former swallows up the latter.

None of these "reformers" confronts directly Jihad (some, such as Soroush, never mention it); none dares to face, or even allude to, the issue of dhimmitude, as experienced by Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and even Hindus, over 1350 years of Muslim subjugation. Nor does one find proposals to permit full freedom of religion, including the right of Muslims to abandon their religion for another faith, or no faith at all -- surely the most essential right if freedom of conscience is to mean anything. Instead, we have a lot of busying about with such intra-Islamic matters as allowing women to drive or to vote, or in modifying the harshness of the criminal code -- not unimportant, of course, but really tangential to the matter of the Muslim stance toward Infidels. Cold comfort at this ideological farm, indeed.

The full naivete of such "Islamic Reformation" projects will, among the more skeptical and informed , finally sink in -- and they will return, as they must, to the Ataturk solution: not to attempt to change the immutable tenets of Qur'an and hadith, enshrined in the shari'a, nor to attempt to prestidigitate away the Muslim invokation of abrogation (which has given rise to an entire "science of abrogation" or Nasikh wa Mansukh), by which some hope to rescue the milder verses of the Qur'an that have been completely "abrogated" away by the much harsher contradictory verses that are later in time -- or so Muslims have believed for more than a millennium.

Instead, "moderate" Muslims (a slippery concept) must work to constrain and limit what can be mentioned in the khutbas (Friday Sermons), to ban the hijab or penalize those who wear it, to seek to cut whatever links could be cut between Arabs and other non-Muslims (for the Turks of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's day, it was not much of a problem; the Arabs had not yet come into their accident-of-geology largesse). And Ataturk certainly did attempt to weaken Islam, to strengthen the idea of the nation-state, and to demoralize, or put on the run, the True Believers. Of course, because there has not been, and cannot be, any change in interpretation of texts (unless the new textual criticism of Christoph Luxenberg and others can help Muslims to refashion their understanding of certain critical passages -- being greeted in Paradise by 72 raisins, as the Syriac proposed by Luxenberg would have it, is not nearly as motivating a reward for martyrdom as being greeted by 72 voracious virgins).

Ibn Warraq:is one of the most meticulous, articulate, amusing and altogether delightful writers of the present age. His books are at last selling widely (Why I Am Not a Muslim is a best-seller in Denmark). At least one or two of them should be assigned in any course on Islam that purports to be something other than the usual apologetics, with the sanitized-by-Sells-Qur'an and rest of it. Indeed, students -- and faculty, and administrators, should be wary indeed of anyone offering instruction on Islam who deliberately leaves Ibn Warraq, or Bat Ye'or, off the syllabus entirely.