The Leftfield Mullah

Some nice points mike. There is no Martin Luther King within the "Progressive" school of islam and there won't be.

The reason is that MLK came from a strong baptist tradition of Pastors who were vocally against the opression forced upon them but wedded to the core spiritual beliefs that guided them.

Thier justification for emancipation was the belief that God created all equally and Jesus was the saviour to all ( thier viewpoint not mine). There wasn't clinically anything wrong with Christianity just its application by those around them.

You won't get that with Islam because too many of our intellectuals are busy condemning Islam and saying there is something wrong with the religion itself. You yourself go on about the "dirty little secret" - which is a depressing thing to read to be honest and I could respond with a barrage of White people's writings on Monotheisn in the Arabian peninsular before the advent of Islam - but I can't be bothered to be honest.

You identify the problem yourself. The Progressive school seems to lack the atomic level commitment to core Islamic principles that the Fundis seem to do blind. I'm not saying it isn't there and Progrsseive muslims are not prepared to be tough and follow through on that belief - Dr Wadud is a good example as are many others out there - but it just doesn't seem apparent.

Yep, the cave dwelling monkeys with beards outside need to get out more and learn to read but the real damage is that the "learned" people sit on their backsides

Let me ask you this? Someone like Pym Furtyn , Pat Buchanan , heck even Bernard "I hate muslims" Lewis comes up to you to start a fight. He takes every single aspect of Islam as starts taking it apart. He calls you religion the vestige of a bunch drunk towel heads who happened upon the great civilisations of Byzantium and Selucid Iran and raped them of everything.

What about people like Patricia Crone, and Gerald Hawting (my Islamic History Professor) who says there never was a Mohammed? What about Ignacius Goldzhier who says that the Quran was made up about 300 years after "Mohammed".

What do you do? Start appologising or put him down with your faith and knowledge?

That's the divide. I'm not going to let some half arsed "professor" of some western univerisity event think he's going to have an easy time of dissing my religion.

We bear witness to Madinatul Ilm, and Rehmatul lil Alemeen. We were given perfection - we may have corrupted it - but we were given it. From the dawn of creation itself -and if Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton et al can't hack it - let 'em burn.