Dawa Full Movie

[Theodora Andy]

Thepurpose of this report is to suggest the basis for a new anti-dawa strategy, designed to check the advance of political Islam as an ideology and a movement. In the first part, I describe the constitution of political Islam: the foundational principles, terminology, and objectives of Islamist ideology. In the second part, I analyze the infrastructure of political Islam, in particular the institutions and techniques of dawa. In the third part, I propose a number of policies that I believe will, if properly implemented, halt the spread of political Islam in the United States and perhaps also abroad.

A narrow focus on Islamist violence had the effect of restricting our options only to tools such as military intervention, electronic surveillance, and the criminal justice system. This approach has proved both costly and ineffective.

I argue that the American public urgently needs to be educated about both the ideology of political Islam and the organizational infrastructure called dawa that Islamists use to inspire, indoctrinate, recruit, finance, and mobilize those Muslims whom they win over to their cause.

The other part of the strategy requires confronting dawa, a term unfamiliar to Americans. Dawa as practiced by radical Islamists employs a wide range of mechanisms to advance their goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society. This includes proselytizing but extends beyond that.4 In Western countries, dawa aims both to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and to instill Islamist views in existing Muslims.5 The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with the rule of sharia law.

There are of course differences. The biggest difference is that dawa is rooted in the Islamic practice of attempting to convert non-Muslims to accept the message of Islam. As it is an ostensibly religious missionary activity, proponents of dawa enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.

With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind.

In this free downloadable report, Hirsi Ali argues that the American public urgently needs to be educated about both the ideology of political Islam, dawa, and the organizational infrastructure that Islamists use to inspire, indoctrinate, recruit, finance, and mobilize those Muslims whom they hope to win over to the extremist cause.

In The Challenge of Dawa, Ali explains that a narrow U.S. policy focus on Islamist violence had the effect of restricting our options to tools such as military intervention, electronic surveillance, and the criminal justice system and that this approach has proved both costly and ineffective. She believes the new administration has the opportunity to broaden our strategy and redefine the threat posed by political Islam. Ali offers an anti-dawa counter strategy, designed to check the advance of political Islam as an ideology and a movement by proposing a series of detailed policy recommendations that, if properly implemented, will counter the spread of political Islam in the United States and perhaps also abroad.

Needless to say, the dawa activities of these modern revivalist movements often met with stiff resistance when they contravened the political authorities in their homelands. This was especially the case for activists of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were severely suppressed by secularist Arab rulers. From the mid 1950s and through the 1960s, many senior members of the Brotherhood were forced to leave their homelands because of government crackdowns on their movement.5 Numerous activists found refuge in Muslim states sympathetic to their cause, while still others fled for Europe and, later, to North America.

In proposing these beliefs, Murad was effectively extending the principles and ideas of reformist salafism, which were originally developed for the modernization of Islam within Muslim societies; he applied them to novel tasks and assorted challenges of propagating Islam in the West. In short, Murad proposed that Islam be transformed from a culturally exotic and alien religion into a religion that could become part of--and eventually spread and transform from within--European society.

Another important aspect of Murad's practical dawa was the recognition that Europe is a primarily secular society, and that Muslims should not argue with Europeans on a purely religious basis, trying to provee the advantages of Islam over Christianity.33 He similarly states that since Europe is a primarily secular society, dawa should seek to call non-Muslims to Islam not by focusing esclusively on religious matters, but by offering Islamic perspectives on social and political topics like unemployment, nuclear weapons, imperialism and the environment.34

Murad was also one of the first dawa theorists to articulate the idea that successfully converting others to Islam requires, on the part of Muslims, a change of attitude towards people of other religions. This marked a shift away from the practice of other Islamist revivalists such as Mawdudi, who frequently characterized non-Muslims as kufr, or infidels.35 Of course, some Western-based Muslims continue to call non-Muslims by this term today, and this rhetoric is often combined with demands for isolation and a hostile attitude towards Westerners. Murad, on the other hand, argued that using the term kufr, as well as other polemics and hostilities, was counterproductive for dawa. In this same vein, he also sought to develop psychological methods to reduce overt hostilities between Muslims and non-Muslims.

In the 1990s, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the prominent spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, dramatically re-envisioned the strategy of the worldwide Islamist revivalist movement, and in the process, offered a bold new vision for Islamic dawa in Western countries. Until recently, Qaradawi has been very active implementing that vision and establishing a basis for the international Muslim Brotherhood and associated movements in Europe (he has been banned from entering the U.S. since 1999).

In 1997, Qaradawi founded the European Center for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) in Dublin,38 a council of mainly non-European Sunni scholars, presided over by Qaradawi, which seeks to develop a European interpretation of Islamic law from within the classical framework of Islamic jurisprudence. This may also be critically understood as an attempt by Islamists to introduce their understanding of the sharia as the dominant law in inter-Muslim relations and personal affairs for European Muslim populations and to unite them under the authority of the ulama of a specific Islamic movement. European Muslims can read ECFR fatwas and articles on European Islam in Arabic and English on its website -cfr.org/.39 Qaradawi is also one of the founders of the transnational Islamic website IslamOnline.40 This site contains a special section for European Muslims, and since 1997 has regularly published fatwas for Muslims in Europe, as well as articles in Arabic and English that deal with the subject of European Islam.

Qaradawi has been critical of the classical Muslim division of the world into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb and the connected view that Muslim settlement outside of dar al-Islam is undesirable or impermissible.41 Instead, he divides the world into three categories: dar al-harb, dar al-Islam and dar al-ahd, or a land of truce. Most European countries (except Serbia) are defined by Qaradawi today as dar al-ahd, due to their diplomatic and other connections with Muslim countries. This means, among other things, that Muslims have to respect European laws as long as they do not conflict with the fundamental principles of Islamic law.42

The legal methodology of the fiqh al-aqalliyyat remains within the broader framework of classical jurisprudence, which relies on the Quran, Sunna, qiyas (analogy) and ijma (consensus). Yet the ECFR additionally encourages the use of juristic devices that allow legal leniencies, so that Muslim communities in non-Muslim lands are able to develop and influence the societies in which they live and engage in dawa to non-Muslims. These devices are maslaha (public interest) and maslaha mursala (public interest not based on divine text), darura, taysir (making fiqh easy) and urf (custom). Fiqh al-aqalliyyat represents a reassessment and elevation of these devices of traditional Islamic jurisprudence for the purposes of propagating a new understanding of Islam that addresses the novel, and expressly modern circumstances of Muslims residing in non-Islamic lands.

In this and other respects, fiqh al-aqalliyat is clearly an outgrowth of the reformist-salafist teachings of Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905), Rashid Rida (d. 1935) and the Egyptian jurist Abd al-Wahhab Khallaf (d. 1956)--all thinkers who sought the tools of traditional jurisprudence to discover Islamic ways to meet the various challenges of modern life.55 For contemporary Islamic thinkers, the crucial question is not about the legitimacy of these devices; most, in fact, accept them as legitimate, and they have been used throughout Islamic history to various degrees.56 The crucial question for the present day is the extent to which these devices may be used in ijtihad, as well as how far each of these devices can prevail over the four traditional judicial sources, or whether they might be used to overrule legal decisions that are commonly regarded as binding for all Muslims.

Rather than seeing Europe as a land of war or of truce, Ramadan embraces the idea of Europe as dar al-dawa or--as he prefers to call it-- dar al-shahada. The theoretical foundation for his concept of Europe as a space for the relatively unfettered propagation of Islam was developed in the 1980s by the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood activist Faisal Mawlawi in a book entitled al-Usus al-Sharia lil-Aalaqat Bayna al-Muslimin wa Ghayr al-Muslimin (The Sharia Foundations for the Relations Between Muslims and Non-Muslims).77 Based on the revivalist view that Islam is a universal religion, Mawlawi has declared that the whole of the world, with the exception of countries at war with Muslims, constitutes dar al-dawa, and is open to Islamic proselytization.78

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