Tawfik Hamid on Point of Inquiry
  March 18, 2007, 9:57 am

Dr. Tawfik Hamid was the featured guest on the March 16 episode of Point of Inquiry, a popular podcast produced by the Center for Inquiry. In this discussion with Point of Inquiry host D.J. Grothe, Hamid discusses his experiences with extremist Islam and the Al Quada affiliated organization he joined, the question of moderate Islam and moderate Muslim organizations such as the Council on Islamic American Relations. He also explores the dire need for Islam to be reformed, and the Secular Islam Summit.

Download the interview at pointofinquiry.org.

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Washington Times sees "historic significance"
  March 18, 2007, 9:51 am
The Washington Times ran an op-ed on March 16 calling the St. Petersburg Declaration a "document of historic significance":

A document of historic significance was issued by the delegates at this event -- "The St. Petersburg Declaration." It was a call for openness, dialogue, democracy, gender equality and peaceful reason to be applied in the Islamic world. Among other things, it declared, "We demand the release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy...We say to Muslim believers: there is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine."

For the most part, federal government officials treated the conference and its noble delegates with disdain.However, American officials at every level must treat these Arabic dissenters and refuseniks as national treasures to be encouraged and protected.They must start with security and immediately go after the American jihadists who make frequent threats of murder and rape to the dissenters.

We all must support the vital task of protecting the lives and dignity of these brave pioneers on the ramparts of peaceful Islamic reform who are keeping the spark of hope alive.

Read the article online.


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Washington Post's pro-CAIR coverage
  March 18, 2007, 9:38 am

The Washington Post covered the Secular Islam Summit on Saturday, March 17, nearly two weeks after the event, running an article by Geneive Abdo, an invited speaker at the Florida CAIR conference. Her article, entitled "A More Islamic Islam," adopts CAIR's point of view of the event as anti-Muslim:

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- A small group of self-proclaimed secular Muslims from North America and elsewhere gathered in St. Petersburg recently for what they billed as a new global movement to correct the assumed wrongs of Islam and call for an Islamic Reformation

 Across the state in Fort Lauderdale, Muslim leaders from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Washington-based advocacy group whose members the "secular" Muslims claim are radicals, denounced any notion of a Reformation as another attempt by the West to impose its history and philosophy on the Islamic world.

The self-proclaimed secularists represent only a small minority of Muslims. The views among religious Muslims from CAIR more closely reflect the views of the majority, not only in the United States but worldwide. Yet Western media, governments and neoconservative pundits pay more attention to the secular minority.

Read the article online.


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Robert Spencer asks, Why won't CAIR endorse the St. Petersburg Declaration?
  March 13, 2007, 10:45 am
Writing for FrontPage Magazine, Robert Spencer points out that "no journalist has had the presence of mind or the courage to ask any CAIR official point-blank what he or she actually thinks of the content of the St. Petersburg Declaration."::

The Council on American Islamic Relations bills itself as “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group” and claims that “its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.”

. . . Shouldn’t a dedicated and sincere group of Islamic moderates jump at the chance to go on record opposing “all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy,” as well as opposing “female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage”?

Shouldn’t CAIR gladly and without hesitation endorse a statement calling for protection of “sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence” and the elimination of “sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims”? Isn’t CAIR dedicated to protecting “civil liberties”? And as for the developing of “an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation,” wouldn’t such a public atmosphere help CAIR “encourage dialogue” and “build coalitions”?

Read the entire article online.

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Toronto Sun: "Modest beginnings for events of great consequence"
  March 12, 2007, 6:08 am
Writing for the Toronto Sun, Salim Mansur compares the Secuar Islam Summit to pivotal events in history of Christendom:

Individuals coming together, as in Florida, to push for Islamic reform may be small in number and generally unknown to the public outside their circle of friends and supporters. Such modest beginnings for events of great consequences are not uncommon in history.

It might be worth recalling how efforts of individuals not widely known to the public unleashed the Reformation of Christianity and made for the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Martin Luther was an obscure monk when he posted his 95 propositions on the doors of All Saints' church in Wittenberg in October 1517, and he could not have imagined how greatly he contributed to the convulsion that consumed Europe for the next several centuries.

A successful Islamic reform will occur when many more Muslims insist on the "release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxy."

Then Muslims might find for themselves "a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine" as the brave individuals gathered together at the first Secular Islam Summit dared publicly to imagine.

Read the article online.

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CAIR's campaign against "illegitimate" summit
  March 11, 2007, 6:15 pm
From The Investor's Business Daily, March 6, 2007:

The first Secular Islam Summit was a success if for no other reason than it intimidated the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the PR machine of militant Islam.

The Washington-based group that boycotts airlines and bullies radio personalities and politicians into toeing the Islamist line is clearly worried about the message from Muslim reformers.

It dispatched its henchmen to Florida to shout the reformers down at their confab earlier this week. CAIR also posted on its Web site no fewer than four stories bashing the event and its courageous speakers, many of whom are women calling for an end to inequality and mistreatment under radical Islam.

CAIR declared the summit illegitimate because few of the participatns are "practicing Muslims," and those who are, it claims, are merely pawns playing into the hands of "Isalamophobes."

Read the entire article online.


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Times of London: Western intellectuals must stand with Muslim dissidents
  March 7, 2007, 5:49 pm
In a March 7 column for The Times of London, New York-based writer Phyllis Chesler praises the Secular Islam Summit and calls on Western thinkers to support its aims:

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Read the complete article online.



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Behind-the-scenes video
  March 7, 2007, 4:56 pm
Filmmaker Andrew Marcus attended the summit, and produced the following video for Pajamas Media.

The video includes interviews with - Walid Phares, Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji, Nonie Darwish, Tawfik Hamid, Wafa Sultan and Michael Ledeen.


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Wall Street Journal: A "landmark" summit
  March 6, 2007, 1:11 pm
From the Tuesday, March 6 column "Global View, by Bret Stephens on the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal:

At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims.

There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I am not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayam al-Zawahiri. . . .

There are even a few practicing Muslims, here, such as the Canadian author Irshad Manji. Ms. Manji, whose documentary "Faith Without Fear" airs on PBS next month, describes herself as a "radical traditionalist" and draws a sharp distinction between Muslim moderates nad reformers: "Moderate Muslims denounce terror that's committed in the name of Islam but they deny that religion has anything to do with it," she says. "Reform-minded Muslims denouce terror that's committed in the name of Islam and acknowledge that our religion is used to inspire it."


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The St. Petersburg Declaration
  March 5, 2007, 3:15 pm

Released by the delegates to the Secular Islam Summit, St. Petersburg, Florida on March 5, 2007

Email your support of the Declaration.

We are secular Muslims, and secular persons of Muslim societies. We are believers, doubters, and unbelievers, brought together by a great struggle, not between the West and Islam, but between the free and the unfree.

We affirm the inviolable freedom of the individual conscience. We believe in the equality of all human persons.

We insist upon the separation of religion from state and the observance of universal human rights.

We find traditions of liberty, rationality, and tolerance in the rich histories of pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. These values do not belong to the West or the East; they are the common moral heritage of humankind.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali endorses Summit declaration
  March 4, 2007, 6:34 am

The former Dutch MP, human rights activist, and controversial author Ayaan Hirsi Ali has expressed her support for the work of the Secular Islam Summit and added her name to the declaration that will be released on Monday, March 5.

Ali is the author of Infidel and The Cage Virgin.



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Al Arabiya covers Summit
  March 2, 2007, 8:23 am
The prominent Arabic 24-hour news channel Al Arabiya has reported on the Secular Islam Summit. The station, based in Dubai Media City, was launched in 2003 and now broadcasts in the Middle East, Asia Pacific, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe, the Americas and Australia.

See the Al Arabiya website.





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