Another Muslim "reformer"

The interviewee here, a "liberal" Muslim by the name of Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi (I doubt he's a Shaker or a Quaker), demonstrates the same flaws that all Muslims who are historicist reformers demonstrate -- namely, they locate all the pathology of Islam in post-Mohammedan (and post-Koranic) history, and leave Mohammed and the Koran pristine.

Thus, Al-Nabulsi describes that the pernicious fusion of state and religion -- the nodal source of Islamic pathology -- "is the stratagem at which Arab rulers have excelled, from the era of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan up until today." Notice how he locates the beginning point of that deleterious "stratagem" decidedly after Mohammed's death. Has it not occurred to Al-Nabulsi that Mohammed himself solidly and clearly established that pathological "stratagem"? No, apparently Al-Nabulsi cannot possibly face this terrible fact about his Prophet: the "stratagem" must have been the result of machinations of later Caliphs and Sultans and other clerics, in their pathological self-interest and misunderstanding of their own Islam politically fusing the sacred and the profane.

Such an astounding lacuna in the mind of Al-Nabulsi can only be explained two ways: either he is so mentally impaired that he can actually be a Muslim and study his own Islam and still miss the massive fact that Mohammed himself is the source of the pathology of Islam; or he is lying to us. There is no third alternative. Or, rather, the third possible alternative -- that Al-Nabulsi is actually that shockingly ignorant of a subject in which he has dedicated his life and study -- is highly improbable.

The queer dilemma of Muslim reformers like Al-Nabulsi that I have described applies also to the other reformers touted by FrontPage on their front page (on the lower left): Raheel Raza, Hasan Mahmud, Tarek Fatah, Linda Ahmed, Edip Yuksel, Thomas Haidon, Khalim Massoud (and likely the pitiably small numbers of others one may be able to scrounge up here and there). We may, in addition, add to this list Spencer's token, and now deceased, Muslim who had officially joined the staff of Jihad Watch, Tashbih Sayyed (whose linked name is solemnly displayed on the side banner of Jihad Watch along with luminaries who have died, including Oriana Fallaci -- a reckless juxtaposition).

These strange Muslims -- though not strange at all if they are simply trying to deceive us -- are not at all like the others who are listed beneath them on FrontPage's front page: among them Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, and Abul Kasem. These latter expatriates have cut the cord to their insanity, and/or to their inveterate taqiyya: they have escaped the mental, physical, cultural and spiritual Gulag of Islam and rejoined humanity, much as the Egyptian-Italian Muslim, Magdi Allam, did earlier this year when after a life of struggling with his Islamic "struggle" he finally brought himself to the logical conclusion of his mind thinking Islam through, which, to any sane and intelligent person -- unlike the list of Muslim "reformers" --, leads to rejecting Islam altogether.