Muslims Are Cool to Pope's Holy Land Pilgrimage

By DIAA HADID

The Associated Press

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:55 AM

NAZARETH, Israel -- A banner across the main square in Jesus' boyhood town condemns those who insult Islam's Prophet Muhammad _ a message by Muslim hard-liners for Pope Benedict XVI during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land next month.

The pontiff may have to tread carefully with his visit to Nazareth. Many Muslims are still angry over a 2006 speech in which Benedict quoted a medieval text depicting the prophet as violent.

Even some Christians are nervous that Benedict could stir up trouble for them. They worry that if he says anything contentious about Islam again, Muslims might lash out.

"He must know that every word he will utter will have an impact on Christian Palestinians and religious relations," said Naim Ateek, an Anglican reverend and director of Sabeel, an ecumenical Palestinian Christian group that includes Catholics.

The banner was put up by followers of Nazem Abu Salim, a radical Muslim preacher, right next to the Church of the Annunciation, where tradition says the Angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus.

It is there for the pope, Abu Salim said. "He is not welcome here."

The banner _ clearly visible from the church, which Benedict is to visit _ trumpets a verse from the Quran declaring, "Those who harm God and His Messenger _ God has cursed them in this world and in the hereafter, and has prepared for them a humiliating punishment."

Municipal official Suheil Diab wouldn't say if the banner, along with a small sign in English with the verse, would be removed before the pope arrives May 14.

Benedict plans to meet with Muslim leaders, though not Abu Salim, throughout his May 8-15 tour of the Holy Land, which includes stops in Jordan, the West Bank, Jerusalem and Nazareth, one of Israel's largest Arab cities.

Islamic leaders in Israel are divided over the visit.

One of the leading Muslim groups in Israel, the Northern Islamic Movement, is calling for a boycott of meetings unless Benedict apologizes for his 2006 remarks, said a spokesman, Zahi Nujeidat. The movement, which has not been invited to meet with the pontiff, can marshal thousands of supporters, but has not yet decided whether to stage protests.

Other Muslim clerics said they would sit down with Benedict but ask for an apology. One of those is Sheik Taysir Tamimi, a leading cleric in the Palestinian Authority, which has welcomed the pope's trip.

Muslims are a growing and increasingly assertive majority in Nazareth, which is 70 percent Muslim but has a communist mayor from the city's Christian community.

A decade ago, brawls erupted over Muslim attempts to build a mosque beside the Church of the Annunciation. The project was eventually thwarted. What remains is a stone-paved square and a small mosque, headed by Abu Salim.

Nazareth is one of the main cities for Israel's Arab minority, who make up around 20 percent of the country's 7 million people. Christians number around 120,000 of the Arab community, roughly half Catholic, half Eastern Orthodox.

Benedict's 2006 speech citing obscure medieval text that characterized some of Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman" sparked protests in the West Bank and Gaza _ though not in Israel. Attackers fired guns and threw firebombs at Palestinian churches.

Benedict later said the text did not reflect his views, but many Muslims believe he did not apologize properly.

In Nazareth, the pontiff is to visit the Church of the Annunciation, host an interfaith discussion and meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He'll also celebrate Mass on nearby Mount Precipice, where many Christians believe a mob pursued Jesus and tried to throw him from a cliff.

The pope will strive to improve interfaith relations throughout his tour, said Wadi Abunassar, a spokesman for the pontiff's visit.

Nazareth's local government has set aside $5 million to spruce up the crowded, shabby city overlooking the Galilee hills, hoping the papal visit will boost tourism, Mayor Ramiz Jaraisy said.

Few in Nazareth's bazaar show any excitement, however. Many remain bitter over Israel's offensive in Gaza against Hamas militants, which killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in December and January.

"People here are tired and exhausted from this situation," said Amin Ali, 72, an antique seller who described himself as a secular Muslim. "And nobody likes this pope, anyway."

Benedict should use his visit to censure Israel over Gaza and the lack of progress in reaching peace with the Palestinians, said Ateek, the Anglican reverend.

"If the pope is brave enough to do that, people will respect him more," Ateek said.

Pakistanis Find Success in Fetish Business

From the New York Times - April 27, 2009

Related Video

Zackary Canepari for The New York Times

A factory worker assembles a flogging whip manufactured by AQTH, a Karachi-based fetish and bondage products company.

________________________________

April 28, 2009

Karachi Journal

Pakistanis Find Success in Fetish Business

By ADAM B. ELLICK

KARACHI, Pakistan — In Pakistan, a flogger is known only as the Taliban's choice whip for beating those who defy their strict codes of Islam.

But deep in the nation's commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West.

Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH, earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe.

The Qadeer brothers, Adnan, 34, and Rizwan, 32, have made the business into an improbable success story in a country where bars are illegal and the poor are often bound to a lifetime in poverty.

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners' wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

"If our mom knew, she would disown us," said Adnan, seated on a leopard-print fabric covering his desk chair.

"Due to cultural barriers and religion, people don't discuss these things openly," Rizwan said. "We have to hide this information."

Even customs officials were perplexed at how to tax the items, not quite sure what they were, they said.

Recently, when a curious employee inquired about the purpose of the sleep sack, a sleeping bag-like product used in certain kinds of bondage, she was told it was a body bag for the American military in Iraq.

Adnan Ahmed, a former air traffic controller who is now AQTH's chief operating officer, said the items were undergarments. When asked if he considered a red-hot puppy mask an undergarment, he had a straightforward, but honest reply: "No. It's just for joking."

Still, word of the business has at times escaped. Last year four "powerful guys" from a conservative Muslim group threatened to burn down the factory if it was not closed within a week. The brothers calmly explained that it was merely a business, and that the items were not used in Pakistan. The next day they bribed a local Islamic political organization to ensure their safety.

These days, the gravest danger is Pakistan's crumbling economy. The brothers idolize former President Pervez Musharraf, crediting their success to his industry friendly policies, like not requiring export licenses and banning trade unions. When Mr. Musharraf resigned last year, the brothers "didn't eat for three days," Adnan said.

Since President Asif Ali Zardari took office, Adnan said, trade unions have been legalized and prices of some raw materials, including leather, have shot up, as have interest rates. The result: a 15 percent dip in AQTH's profits.

Echoing the pervasive fears of entrepreneurs across the country, the brothers are considering relocating to East Asia if Pakistan becomes more unstable — or if they receive another threat.

The shoddy factory seems like an ode to their humble upbringing. Adnan's executive bathroom has no toilet paper. Rizwan has no office. And their preferred lunch is Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Their inspiration for success came from their father, a civil servant who supported a family of six with a $150 monthly salary. While other children were forced into labor, or played aimlessly, the Qadeer brothers had to study.

In 2001, after the brothers graduated from a university, their father lent them $800, enough to purchase their first computer and to cover several months of rent in a studio apartment. There, the brothers searched the Internet day and night for a high-value garment product that was not widely available.

They experimented with basic leather goods, like jackets and pants. Adnan slept at mosquito-infested stitching factories to oversee sample runs that, in the end, proved more costly than their Chinese competitors.

"It was very hard time," Adnan said. "We had nothing in our pockets, not even money to fuel our motorbike."

"People used to say: 'You can't do business in Pakistan. You're wasting your time. Just go get a job,' " Rizwan said. "But our father boosted our morale."

The brothers said Pakistan's "stone-age production" worked to their advantage. The country, they said, lacks visionary product development. "Everyone's still making the same products," Adnan said.

Then, they discovered a kind of straitjacket online. At first, they thought it was used for psychiatric patients, but it quickly led them to learn about the lucrative fetish industry.

Without family connections in the finance industry, and with nothing to mortgage, they were refused a loan by four banks. "Our education was our only connection," Rizwan said.

They finally secured a loan from an American bank, and then the Sept. 11 attacks offered a timely chance. Orders for garment exports were canceled across Pakistan in the slower economic climate, allowing the prices of raw materials like leather to be cut in half.

But fear after Sept. 11 raised suspicions among their own Western clients. On Sept. 12, 2001, a customer sent an e-mail message with a photo of two F-16s flying over Pakistan. Orders were canceled.

Today, they sell their products to online shops, commercial stores and to individuals via eBay. Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats. The Netherlands and Germany account for the bulk of their European sales.

"We really believe that if you are persistent and hard working, there is an opportunity, in any harsh environment, even in an economically depressed environment like Pakistan," Rizwan said.

A major perk, they say, is attending international fetish shows to see how their products hold up in action.

"I go to Sin City every year," said Rizwan, referring to Las Vegas in a sheepish laugh. It's all business, he said. "Clients know our country and culture, and they don't invite us to participate. We're a little bit shy."

Video: Cracking the Whip in Pakistan - Fetish and Bondage Wear

Video Library Home Page - The New York Times: "A Pakistani Underworld"

Despite a threat from Islamists, two Pakistani brothers stealthily manufacture fetish and bondage wear, earning more than $1 million a year from their Western customers.

Related Article from the NY Times - April 27, 2009

Picture of the Week: Islam's Soft Revolution

Olivia Arthur / Magnum for TIME

Karate Kid
Norhan, 10, returns from a training session at Shabab El-Gezira youth center.

Related Article.

Feminist Reforms in Turkey Reflect the Progressive Face of Islam

Feminist reforms in Turkey reflect the progressive face of İslam * by Sertaç Sehlikoğlu Karakaş**

MONTRÉAL -- Turkey has strong ties both with its Muslim history and with secularism, where the latter is taken to mean not mixing religion with politics. After decades of struggling between these two identities, this strategic NATO ally and EU contender has developed a hybrid identity that encompasses both.

As a result, Turkey has increasingly been perceived as a liberal and progressive face of Islam on the global stage and, in congruence with the true spirit of the religion, it is demonstrating its commitment to the empowerment of women. In order to positively affect women's daily lives, though, it will take engaged leadership by religious scholars and feminists in addition to government-initiated reforms. The Directorate of Religious Affairs, the government institution overseeing religious matters since it was established in 1924 and the highest Islamic authority in Turkey, is at the center of the debate on religion and women. Originally, the directorate -- which currently employs approximately 83,000 clerics in local mosques -- was limited to the administration of mosques; it is now focused more on developing new interpretations of Islam. Recently, the Directorate of Religious Affairs initiated a review of hadiths (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), which was well received by Turkish society and reverberated beyond national borders. According to the directorate's explanation, the project's aim is to raise awareness about the inaccuracy of some sexist and apocryphal hadiths accumulated after the death of the Prophet Muhammad by re-emphasizing the importance of morally credible and viable sources. For example, many sexist cultural traditions were wrongly attributed to the Prophet and were added to hadith collections even though their chains of transmission were flawed. The project is expected to yield a collection of hadiths on women combined in a five-volume publication. Its aim is to support women's rights activists in their fight against "honor" killings, violence against women and misogyny in general. In addition, since 2005, the Directorate of Religious Affairs has also offered its female employees the opportunity to upgrade their educational and professional skills so that they can become more qualified for higher-ranking positions. According to Ali Bardakoğlu, head of the directorate, the institution has suffered from a lack of women's contributions for decades. The directorate's goal in recent years has been to promote women to the highest levels of the institution, which Bardakoğlu hopes to accomplish by gradually incorporating them into the directorate's structure. Women will be promoted to positions of assistant cleric, cleric and mufti, an official scholar of Islamic law. Bardakoğlu does not deny that men have thus far been more influential within Islamic institutions, but states that the absence of women in such positions has been due to their lack of higher education -- a reality that can be changed. Despite the women-friendly attitude and speeches of Bardakoğlu, parts of the institution appear reluctant to change. Soon after the directorate's declaration in 2005, which announced its intent to hire 200 new female preachers and appoint women as muftis and vice muftis, a member of the institution authored an article on how women should behave around men so as not to arouse men's sexual desire. Thanks to a vigilant feminist response, the article was removed from the directorate's Web site and the institute issued an apology. Strong feminist criticism -- from both those outside the institution and within it -- is essential to holding the directorate to its goal of empowering women. Feminists continue to push the directorate to implement and institutionalize initiatives that are more inclusive of women. Over the last four years, the Directorate of Religious Affairs has successfully implemented target quotas for women in the above positions (seven women have already been appointed to the position of vice-mufti) and established bureaus to address concerns of women in 21 cities across the country. The drive toward the greater empowerment of women in Turkey has affected not only women's representation in the directorate, but also society more broadly. The well-known religious leader Fethullah Gülen wrote an article in the Zaman daily in September 2008 on the topic of domestic violence. He stated that a woman should be brave enough to take legal action against her husband if she is beaten. Gülen referenced a newer interpretation of religious texts with a Sufi perspective to support his advice. He explained that in the case of domestic violence, the husband should be perceived as zalim, which means tyrannical, and judged guilty of exercising unjust power. Such interpretations can give women the legal backing to press criminal charges against their husbands, or to achieve monetary retribution for mistreatment. His comments provide invaluable scholarly justification for the many women who have long been advocating similar views. Developing modern religious interpretations to address women's issues provides a rich and strong foundation for feminist discourses. The Directorate of Religious Affairs has made significant progress in developing modern and accurate religious interpretations in general and specifically on the subject of women. Though Muslim women still have a long way to go to achieve the rights due to them in Islam, the directorate's reforms -- including giving women access to clerical positions -- and the prevalence of new interpretations of religious sources, are slowly paving the road to empowerment. Feminists are prompting many of these changes in religious interpretation. In turn, strengthening feminism by referencing religion provides guidelines for feminists living in other Muslim countries, a project which is consistent with Turkey's mission to become one of the models of a modern Muslim country. * The article was written for the Common Ground News Service. ** Sertaç Sehlikoğlu Karakaş is a women's rights activist, an active member of the nonprofit organization Women Living under Muslim Laws and is currently pursuing graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Toronto.

26.04.2009

Op-Ed

Islam and Feminism: By Asma Barlas

Islam and feminism

Asma Barlas

Published 22 April 2009

In the third of our series on faith and feminism, Asma Barlas writes about the message of sexual equality in the Qur'an

I have been asked to write about how feminism informs my understanding of faith and if and how faith influences my feminist views. I've discussed the intersection between Islam and feminism many times before and every time I have clarified that I do not like to call myself a feminist; yet, the label continues to stick!

The truth is that long before I learned about feminism, I had begun to glimpse a message of sexual equality in the Qur'an. Perhaps this is paradoxical given that all the translations and interpretations that I read growing up were by men and given that I was born and raised in Pakistan, a society that can hardly be considered egalitarian. Yet, the Qur'an's message of equality resonated in the teaching that women and men have been created from a single self and are each other's guides who have the mutual obligation to enjoin what is right and to forbid what is wrong.

But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur'an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.

It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language--hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how. From reading Muslim history, on the other hand, I discovered that Qur'anic exegesis became more hostile to women only gradually and as a result of shifts in religious knowledge and methodology as well as in the political priorities of Muslim states. And, from feminism, I got the language to speak about patriarchy and sexual equality. In other words, it was all these universes of knowledge that enabled me to encounter the Qur'an anew and to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either.

Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God's speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege and many progressive Muslims to advocate for secularism on the grounds that Islam is oppressive. As for me, I continue to respond to the Qur'an's call to use my reason and intellect to decipher the signs (ayat) of God. Thus far, such an exercise has only brought me to more liberatory understandings of the text itself.

Asma Barlas is professor of Politics and director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, New York.

Faith and Feminism: By Zohra Moosa

Faith and feminism

Zohra Moosa

Published 21 April 2009

In the second of our series on faith and feminism, Zohra Moosa writes about the complementary nature of the two.

I am often probed about how I reconcile my faith with my feminism. Sometimes it comes as an explicit question, as happened when I was interviewed earlier this year for a book on Islam and feminism. I was asked directly whether I found it difficult to reconcile the two, whether there were inherent tensions I had to navigate and how did I square my religion and my belief (the two were conflated in the question) with my feminist convictions.

More often, it is an implied critique, a suggestion that I suffer from some combination of any of: false consciousness, limited agency/choice (where my family, 'community' and/or 'culture' is presumed to be oppressing me), insufficiently robust or analytical intellectual capacities (no one has actually called me 'stupid' yet though), political defensiveness about being Muslim (i.e. refusing to engage in critiques of Islam within the current political/security climate), political or social naiveté, opportunism (some people think it's a good time to peddle being a 'Muslim woman feminist'), and/or a misreading of feminism and/or Islam.

Having grown up with both faith and feminism and never really not had either, I continue to find the suggestion that they are anything other than complementary in my life a bit alien. Intellectually I understand the confusion that prompts the question; I've had enough people quote parts of the Qu'ran at me to have received the message that they would like to tell me: 'your primary text is sexist don't you know'. But to equate a spiritual practice with some people's literal, and historically and politically vacuous, interpretations of a text is to miss the point in a pretty profound way.

My feminism is informed by my faith and vice-versa because of how I live both. Just as my feminism is more than the job I do at the Fawcett Society, so too is my faith more than the prayers I say.

I came to the feminist movement from religious teachings about empathy, peace, social justice, and the need to work for the betterment of others and the world. I was schooled, in religious contexts, to have a healthy intolerance of exploitation, abuse, marginalization, and dis-empowerment. In addition, there were particular religiously-sourced stories about the importance of respecting women, the righteousness of treating women with dignity and fairness, the value in educating girl children over boy children that reinforced feminist principles for me from an early age.

Over time, feminism has become the natural extension of the moral framework that I was inculcated into from birth. There need not have been anything particularly 'Muslim' about my feminist awakenings, but the reality is that in my case there was. In turn, I come to my faith, every day, with a sense of purpose and direction because of my feminist ethics. My spiritual journey is intimately connected with my ideas about humanity and life. As these ideas evolve over time, so too does my spiritual path change, which then affects my politics.

My life is richer for having both faith and feminism in it. So that's how I reconcile the two.

Zohra Moosa is the senior policy and campaigns officer at the Fawcett Society

In Quest for Equal Rights, Muslim Women’s Meeting Turns to Islam’s Tenets

From the New York Times

February 16, 2009

In Quest for Equal Rights, Muslim Women’s Meeting Turns to Islam’s Tenets

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The religious order banning women from dressing like tomboys was bad enough. But the fatwa by this country’s leading clerics against yoga was the last straw.

“They have never even done yoga,” said Zainah Anwar, a founder of a Malaysian women’s rights group called Sisters in Islam.

Ms. Anwar argues that the edict, issued late last year by the National Fatwa Council of Malaysia, is pure patriarchy. Islam, she says, is only a cover.

It was frustrations like those that drew several hundred Muslim women to a conference in this Muslim-majority country over the weekend. Their mission was to come up with ways to demand equal rights for women. And their tools, however unlikely, were the tenets of Islam itself.

“Secular feminism has fulfilled its historical role, but it has nothing more to give us,” said Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an Iranian anthropologist who has been helping to formulate some of the arguments. “The challenge we face now is theological.”

The advocates came from 47 countries to participate in the project, called Musawah, the Arabic word for equality. They spent the weekend brainstorming and learning the best Islamic arguments to take back to their own societies as defenses against clerics who insist that women’s lives are dictated by men’s strict interpretations of Islam.

“We are trying to develop a new language, offer it to the world and use it,” said Marwa Sharafeldin, an activist from Egypt.

Ms. Anwar, the main organizer, said her group was almost alone when she started it 20 years ago, but now it is one of many. “It’s a movement whose time has come.”

The repression comes not from the Koran, the women argue, but from the human interpretation of it, in the form of Islamic law, which has ossified over the centuries while their globalized lives have galloped ahead. So they are going back to the original text, arguing that its emphasis on justice makes the case for equality.

“Feminist Islamic scholarship is trying to unearth the facts that were there,” Ms. Mir-Hosseini told a room of eager activists Sunday. “We can’t be afraid to look at legal tradition critically.”

She referred to the work of Muslim intellectuals, like Nasr Abu Zayd of Egypt and Abdolkarim Soroush of Iran, reformers who argue that the Koran must be read in a historical context, and that laws derived from it can change with the times. Their ideas are controversial, and both are in exile in the West.

Ms. Mir-Hosseini argues that Muslim societies are trapped in a battle between two visions of Islam: one legalistic and absolutist that emphasizes the past; the other pluralistic and more inclined toward democracy. She said that in Iran reformers were gaining ground, but that President Bush’s antagonism toward the country ended up strengthening hard-liners there.

“It’s really a struggle between two world views,” she said, adding that time was on the side of the women.

It was the rise of political Islam that brought the women together. As Malaysia’s progressive family laws began to be rolled back in the late 1980s, Ms. Anwar and several other women formed a Koran reading group.

“There is an understanding that mullahs know best, that you cannot speak,” Ms. Anwar said. “Muslim women’s groups are coming out to challenge that authority.”

Some scholars argued that the effort sounded unrealistic and would have no impact, mainly because it appeared to ignore more than a thousand years of Islamic legal scholarship and practice. Religious authorities are the only ones with the power to interpret laws, and circumventing that well-entrenched system would require replacing it altogether.

“This kind of argument is being made at the margins of the Islamic world,” said Bernard Haykel, an expert on Islamic law at Princeton University. “It has shape and form, but no substantive content. There’s no real way of actually bringing about these changes.”

But others made the case that change, though incremental, was happening at the grass-roots level in a number of Muslim societies. Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who attended the conference, argues that women’s movements are making progress, as girls’ education levels increase and the Western world is a click away on satellite television. Women are even taking positions in religious institutions, she said: a woman has headed the Shariah College at Qatar University.

“It’s a slow shift,” said Ms. Coleman, whose book on the topic, “Paradise Beneath Her Feet: Women and Reform in the Middle East,” is to be published by Random House in 2010. “It’s just beginning to come together as a movement.”

There have been some successes. In Morocco, sweeping changes of family law in favor of women went into effect in 2004. Critics argued that it was possible only because the country’s king approved it, but Moroccan activists said it never would have happened if they had not spent years lobbying and formulating legal arguments, some of them based on Islamic tenets.

That has had ripple effects. Elaheh Koolaee, a professor from the University of Tehran who formerly served in Iran’s Parliament, said that Iranian women had been watching the Moroccan example and that a Muslim success was an invaluable tool. “It’s important for us to show positive experiences from within Muslim societies that are not from the U.S. or Europe,” she said.

Ms. Mir-Hosseini said she believed that change was coming, and that it was just a matter of when.

“There’s so much tension and energy there now,” she said. “It will be a flood.”

Op-Ed: Islam, Virgins and Grapes

---

April 23, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Islam, Virgins and Grapes

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In Afghanistan, 300 brave women marched to demand a measure of equal rights, defying a furious mob of about 1,000 people who spat, threw stones and called the women “whores.” The marchers asserted that a woman should not need her husband’s consent to go to school or work outside the home.

In Pakistan, the Taliban flogged a teenage girl in front of a crowd, as two men held her face down in the dirt. A video shows the girl, whose “crime” may have been to go out of her house alone, crying piteously that she will never break the rules again.

Muslim fundamentalists damage Islam far more than any number of Danish cartoonists ever could, for it’s inevitably the extremists who capture the world’s attention. But there is the beginning of an intellectual reform movement in the Islamic world, and one window into this awakening was an international conference this week at the University of Notre Dame on the latest scholarship about the Koran.

“We’re experiencing right now in Koranic studies a rise of interest analogous to the rise of critical Bible studies in the 19th century,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Notre Dame professor and organizer of the conference.

The Notre Dame conference probably could not have occurred in a Muslim country, for the rigorous application of historical analysis to the Koran is as controversial today in the Muslim world as its application to the Bible was in the 1800s. For some literal-minded Christians, it was traumatic to discover that the ending of the Gospel of Mark, describing encounters with the resurrected Jesus, is stylistically different from the rest of Mark and is widely regarded by scholars as a later addition.

Likewise, Biblical scholars distressed the faithful by focusing on inconsistencies among the gospels. The Gospel of Matthew says that Judas hanged himself, while Acts describes him falling down in a field and dying; the Gospel of John disagrees with other gospels about whether the crucifixion occurred on Passover or the day before. For those who considered every word of the Bible literally God’s word, this kind of scholarship felt sacrilegious.

Now those same discomfiting analytical tools are being applied to the Koran. At Notre Dame, scholars analyzed ancient texts of the Koran that show signs of writing that was erased and rewritten. Other scholars challenged traditional interpretations of the Koran such as the notion that some other person (perhaps Judas or Peter) was transformed to look like Jesus and crucified in his place, while Jesus himself escaped to heaven.

One scholar at the Notre Dame conference, who uses the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for safety, has raised eyebrows and hackles by suggesting that the “houri” promised to martyrs when they reach Heaven doesn’t actually mean “virgin” after all. He argues that instead it means “grapes,” and since conceptions of paradise involved bounteous fruit, that might make sense. But suicide bombers presumably would be in for a disappointment if they reached the pearly gates and were presented 72 grapes.

One of the scholars at the Notre Dame conference whom I particularly admire is Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian Muslim who argues eloquently that if the Koran is interpreted sensibly in context then it carries a strong message of social justice and women’s rights.

Dr. Abu Zayd’s own career underscores the challenges that scholars face in the Muslim world. When he declared that keeping slave girls and taxing non-Muslims were contrary to Islam, he infuriated conservative judges. An Egyptian court declared that he couldn’t be a real Muslim and thus divorced him from his wife (who, as a Muslim woman, was not eligible to be married to a non-Muslim). The couple fled to Europe, and Dr. Abu Zayd is helping the LibForAll Foundation, which promotes moderate interpretations throughout the Islamic world.

“The Islamic reformation started as early as the 19th century,” notes Dr. Abu Zayd, and, of course, it has even earlier roots as well. One important school of Koranic scholarship, Mutazilism, held 1,000 years ago that the Koran need not be interpreted literally, and even today Iranian scholars are surprisingly open to critical scholarship and interpretations.

If the Islamic world is going to enjoy a revival, if fundamentalists are to be tamed, if women are to be employed more productively, then moderate interpretations of the Koran will have to gain ascendancy. There are signs of that, including a brand of “feminist Islam” that cites verses and traditions suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad favored women’s rights.

Professor Reynolds says that Muslim scholars have asked that conference papers be translated into Arabic so that they can get a broader hearing. If the great intellectual fires are reawakening within Islam, after centuries of torpor, then that will be the best weapon yet against extremism.

•

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

Picture of the Week: Islam's Soft Revolution

Olivia Arthur / Magnum for TIME

Lover's Bridge
Couples gather in the evening on Cairo's Qasr el-Nil Bridge. Though there are no chaperones present, there are police, and public dispays of affection are not allowed in general. Couples who retire to a more private park nearby are watched by a man with a whistle.

Related Article.