By AY Mol on 10-12-2011 11:26

On the evening of 7 december were Irshad Manji and Tofik Dibi, a member of Dutch parliament, the main speakers at De Balie, a public center in Amsterdam, where they discussed on the love, freedom and hardships that surround Islamic reform. Unfortunately they had to withstand a brief interruption of hatred. The beautiful turned into the  bizarre when a group of 20 young hatemongerers disrupted the debate in the name of Islam and started screaming and threatening everyone present, especially Irshad. Other attendees, such as Thijs Kleinpaste (see links below), have already described the whole event so I want to concentrate on the question on how I experienced it as a Muslim and a friend of Irshad.On Tuesday 6 December, the evening before, there was a similar discussion between Irshad and I in the Geerte Church in Utrecht (a recording of this interesting evening will soon be available) where we focused on the present obstacles within Muslim cultures which block the progressive flexibility of Islam. With cultures I...

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By AY Mol on 30-4-2011 14:29

Compassie is een humanistisch begrip dat in bijna alle levensbeschouwingen voorkomt. Maar dit begrip wordt in elke taal op een andere manier uitgedrukt. Om de betekenis van ‘compassie’ in de islam uit te leggen, moeten we daarom eerst het wereldbeeld van deze Semitische religie begrijpen.

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By AY Mol on 30-1-2011 17:06

 

In recent years, the criticism on human rights and Islam has increased. This includes two extreme views which surprisingly both have the same claim, namely that Islam and human rights do not go together. One group 'Western secular vision " which sees Islam as a religion with fossilized medieval laws incompatible with contemporary "Western human rights'. The other group consists of Muslims from an orthodox-dogmatic perspective 'argues that the phenomenon of' human rights'  is a human, Western innovation in no way compatible with the divine law.

 

To form a correct vision on human rights in Islam, we must begin by reading texts in the Qur’an itself and examine the context in which these texts were created. We immediately notice that Islam introduced revolutionary values to the seventh century Arabs. These revolutionary values came from newly accepted principles such as 'all people have the same origin’, ’all men are equal', 'all people have freedom of religion’ and that Muslims should cooperate with other faiths to pursue a just moral society ( see Qur’anic verses 4:1, 5:8, 5:32, 4:85, 16:90, 4:75, 2:256, 22:39-40, 2:62, 2:148, 3:110 - 115, 5:48, 3:64, 17:70, 42:15, 49:13 and 60:8).

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