Editor, NewAgeIslam.com, Sultan Shahin's oral statement to the current
Thirteenth session of UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on 16 March, 2010:
 

 
UN Human Rights Council
 
Thirteenth session
 

 
Agenda Item 5: General Debate: Human Rights Bodies and Mechanism
 
Oral Statement by: Sultan Shahin
 
On behalf of: International Club for Peace Research
 
Mr. President,
 
I would like to confine myself to reflecting on the problems of religious
minorities, particularly Muslim minorities who are facing xenophobia and
related forms of intolerance today in an atmosphere of widespread
Islamophobia. We Muslims are also complaining of an attempt to encourage
Islamophobia. The French ban on veils and Swiss ban on minarets has further
vitiated the atmosphere. We do not know for sure how much of this is
deliberate as a sort of anti-Islam crusade as we Muslims allege and how much
is a paranoid reaction to growing radicalism, extremism and exclusivism in
Islamic societies.
 
But I find a note of introspection on the part of us Muslims and Muslim
governments completely missing in the continuing debate. I intend to do
precisely that today. While we Muslims demand, and rightly so, the freedom
to freely practise and propagate our religion in the non-Muslim majority
countries, we do not seem to worry about the plight of religious minorities
living in Muslim-majority lands.
 
That Muslim societies in general have radicalised over the last decades
cannot be denied. This has been a direct result of tens of billions of
petrodollars having been spent in promoting a rigid, obscurantist,
desiccated version of Islam, shorn of all its beauty and bounty. Preachers
of what I can only call "petrodollar Islam" have gone around the world
asking Muslims to develop a separate identity that distinguishes them not
only in the practice of Islamic prayer rituals but also looks and apparel.
The phenomenal rise in Muslim women wearing hijab and an assortment of veils
or men growing what is called an Islamic beard is no accident.
 
Discrimination against religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries has
grown. Anti-blasphemy laws, for instance, have been routinely used to harass
and commit acts of violence against religious minorities. The Report of the
Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Asma Jahangir,
mentioned the case of Christians and the minority Muslim sect of Ahmadis who
are continually harassed on baseless allegations of blasphemy in Pakistan
despite the government's stated commitment to fulfil its international
obligations. One almost routinely comes across in the media these days
headlines like the following emanating from Muslim-majority countries:
 
Saudi man kills daughter for converting to Christianity
 
Two Sikhs beheaded in Pakistan for refusing to convert to Islam
 
'Scared Pakistani Hindus fleeing to India'
 
Malaysia Strips Hindus of Rights
 
Indonesia: Religious TV jeopardizing pluralism
 
And so on.
 
Mr. President,
 
Another issue that may be fuelling Islamophobia is the widespread
Islam-supremacism in the Muslim community. God told us in the Quran that
Islam is not a new religion; it is the same religion that God has been
sending to this planet through tens of thousands of previous prophets. We
were told that the Holy Quran is merely a reiteration of the messages that
were sent before. We were specifically told not to fall in the trap of
considering ourselves the chosen people. But we did not listen. We have
developed an ideology of Islam-supremacism, contrary to all Islamic
teachings. We have developed a theory that Muslims alone will go to Heaven,
all others are going to be consigned to Hell, no matter how righteous.
Obviously anyone who harbours a feeling of superiority over others cannot
possibly expect to have good relations with them.
 
Then we have allowed a section of Muslims to spread among us a version of
exclusivist Islam that wants us to get away from each and every pre-Islamic
tradition. Pre-Islamic traditions like Hajj and veneration of Kaaba sharif
are intrinsic to Islam itself. But we are told that we should behave and
look different from followers of all other religions and forego all our
local cultural traditions.
 
A derivative of this same petrodollar Islam is what is known as Jihadi
Islam. This Jihadi Islam is taking away our youth, brainwashing them and
turning them into human bombs. It is using some verses of the Holy Quran as
weapons of war. We all know that the Prophet had to fight existential
battles to safeguard Islam. These verses were revealed then to buttress the
war effort. But they are not meant for us to act upon today.
 
While the Jihadi Islam is using these verses to brainwash our youth to
following these dictates to the letter even today, the petrodollar Islam
helps the process by saying repeatedly that every word in the Quran is of
equally universal significance implying that the call to war contained there
has the same value as the call to prayer, for instance, or the call to
righteousness. Apparently the petrodollar Islam and the Jihadi Islam are two
sides of the same coin.
 
We mainstream Muslims are silent spectators; we are allowing both of them to
devastate our societies, create permanent fissures in our relations with
other communities. We are allowing them to suck the spiritual content out of
our religion and fill it with a desiccated, dry, desert version of Islam in
which there is no room for anything that is cheerful or beautiful. One of
the attributes of God is beauty, but there is only ugliness and strife in
the hearts of petrodollar Islamists.
 
Mr. President,
 
Mainstream Islam is still mainstream. These sections are still small, though
with the infusion of massive money power they have grown quite aggressive
lately. It is time, we the Muslim people and our governments stopped merely
demanding rights from the international community but also thought of what
we can ourselves contribute to fulfilling the UN ideals of establishing
peace and safeguarding the human rights of all peoples around the world. It
is time we decided to take the Jihadi bull by its horns. Time for
dilly-dallying is long past. We will have to go back to our roots, our
Quranic roots, our philosophical roots, our greatest saints and their
teachings. We will have to once again inculcate the broadmindedness of our
saints, the generosity and forgiveness, the attitude of gratitude that was
the hallmark of our prophet. It has now become a question of safeguarding
not only our religion but our children, our youth from being whisked away to
Jihadi camps and active and sleeper cells. The very least we can do to
safeguard our own youth as much as the human rights of entire humanity as
well as world peace is to explain to our people loudly and repeatedly:
 
1. That we are not a chosen people; Islam-supremacism is nonsense and
that the ummah of all prophets are equal in the eyes of God who will judge
them according to their own faith, not ours.
2. That the war verses in the Holy Quran were meant for wars being
fought then and do not apply to situations today.
3. That Islam is not the exclusivist religion that the Petrodollar
Islam is preaching. It is a religion of co-existence encapsulated in the
verse lakum deenakum waleya deen (For you be your religion and for me mine)
and La Ikraha fid Deen (There can be no compulsion in religion).
4. That it is dangerous to press for the establishment of Sharia laws
in non-Muslim lands. India is the only non-Muslim majority country in the
world that allows Muslims to organise their family life according to their
own personal laws. But other societies are not prepared for it. Muslim
countries themselves do not allow religious minorities such freedom. So
making a case for that in Europe and other countries creates further
Islamophobia in the present atmosphere in which some fear of Islam and
Muslims should not be difficult to understand, though of course, all
governments should try to fight it and protect legitimate rights of the
Muslim community.
5. That religious freedom is indivisible. If we as a minority community
need freedom, it becomes our duty to also fight for the religious freedom of
minorities in Muslim lands.
6. That Islam itself teaches us Ijtihad, rethinking, so that we can
adjust to the newer realities of changing times.
 
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