[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 145 (Friday, October 7, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                      ``ISLAM ENGAGES THE WORLD''

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we live in a world where Islam is an 
important cultural, religious and political phenomenon.
  Even in the United States, we now have more Moslems than 
Presbyterians.
  And, unquestionably, there is prejudice against Moslems because 
frequently there is a tie-in in the public mind with fanaticism.
  The Christian Century, obviously, not a Moslem publication, recently 
had an article titled ``Islam engages the world.'' No author is given 
for the item, but it is an insight into the Moslem world that is 
divided just as the Christian world, the Jewish world, the Buddhist 
world, and the Hindu world are divided.
  Because we need to have more understanding and because every avenue 
for pursuing that understanding should be followed, I ask to insert the 
Christian Century article into the Record at this point.
  The article follows:

              [From the Christian Century, Sep. 21, 1994]

                        Islam Engages the World

       So much attention was focused on Vatican opposition to 
     abortion at the UN International Conference on Population and 
     Development that it was easy to overlook a far more 
     significant religious milestone. After Cairo, Muslims and 
     non-Muslims have even fewer reasons to speak about a 
     monolithic Islamic world. Such a world, of course, has never 
     existed: Islam has always been a rich mixture of different 
     theological and political traditions. But the Cairo 
     conference marked the first time that Muslims from countries 
     throughout the world met and debated under the glare of such 
     an intense international spotlight.
       It also was the first time that such a major international 
     conference had been held--Egypt--a fact that afforded many 
     non-Muslim delegates and journalists their first significant 
     exposure to a predominantly Muslim country. The resulting 
     encounters, said Riffat Hassan, a Muslim scholar who teaches 
     at the University of Louisville, may prove to be one of those 
     rare moments in history when understanding wins out over 
     intolerance and misunderstanding.
       When it convened September 5, the conference was threatened 
     with violence by Muslim extremists, who said discussion of 
     such issues as birth control, family planning and abortion 
     demeaned Islamic belief. By the end it was clear that the 
     conference ``broke a lot of stereotypes,'' Hassan said, and 
     in doing so it became apparent that there is not one Muslim 
     world, but many. ``We are much more diverse than people think 
     we are,'' said Hassan, a Pakistani who participated in the 
     conference as both an observer and frequent lecturer on 
     problems facing Muslim women. In Hassan's view, Cairo 
     represented a kind of breakthrough for Muslim women. ``We are 
     on the threshold of what women in the United States were 
     experiencing in the '60s--a kind of opening up, a chance to 
     become more vocal.''
       The women had some important allies, particularly on what 
     many consider the most obvious example of repression against 
     Muslim women: female circumcision, the removal of a woman's 
     clitoris. At a public forum on the issue, several of Egypt's 
     most respected scholars and clerics condemned the practice. 
     ``Mecca does not know about female circumcision,'' said 
     Sheikh Mansour Abdel Gaffar. ``The Prophet Muhammad did not 
     circumcise his own daughters.'' At moments like these the 
     Islamic faith put itself through what Hassan called 
     ``something necessary for all religions self-critique.''
       In Cairo the public face of Islam was not limited to 
     strictly theological concerns. Abdallah Schleifer, an 
     American-born Muslim journalist and a professor at Cairo's 
     American University, said the fact that a number of Islamic 
     nations--including Iran--ignored a call by other Muslim 
     countries to boycott the conference affirmed a long Islamic 
     tradition of ``being ready to engage intellectually'' with 
     the rest of the world. ``by participating, they [the 
     Iranians] ceased to be `The Other,''' Schleifer said.
       The Cairo conference generated vocal criticism from a 
     number of Islamic and non-Islamic observers. Saudi Arabia, 
     the Sudan and Lebanon boycotted the conference, saying it was 
     a Western, secular-oriented gathering that would weaken the 
     family and undercut sexual ethics. Many Muslim leaders, 
     citing Islamic law and tradition, joined with the Vatican to 
     condemn what they perceived as the conference's support for 
     abortion as a means of birth control. Participants in an 
     early September meeting of the Islamic Society of North 
     America in Chicago maintained that the Cairo conference's 
     action plan for population control is essentially a Western 
     conspiracy to ruin the Muslim world.
       Still other critics objected that the conference glossed 
     over consumption and development issues--issues expected to 
     be addressed at the UN's Social Development Summit next year. 
     A coalition that included the World YWCA and various Third 
     World organizations declared that ``we find the Program of 
     Action to be nothing but an insult to women, men and children 
     of the South who will receive an ever-growing dose of 
     population assistance, while their issues of life and death 
     will await'' the 1995 summit. Charges were also made that the 
     conference's emphasis on reproductive issues ignored more 
     pressing social and economic problems in developing nations, 
     such as the servicing of foreign debt and continued 
     widespread poverty.
       ``For us, coming from the South, [reproductive issues] 
     don't form the crux of the central issue that affects the 
     lives of millions of women in our countries,'' noted Evelyn 
     Hong, a member of the activist group Third World Network. 
     ``The burning issues are social and economic problems.'' As 
     the conference neared its end September 12, a dozen 
     protesters representing a coalition of several hundred Third 
     World women ringed the gates of the conference site terming 
     the event an attempt by richer nations to impose order on the 
     developing world. International conferences, argued Cairo 
     University professor Awatef Abdel-Rahman, have become a way 
     for the North to impose its ``new world order'' on the South.
       Despite such harsh, unbending criticism, some Western 
     delegates nevertheless expressed appreciation for what they 
     characterized as the pointed but reasoned stance that the 
     participating Islamic nations took against abortion. One 
     senior U.S. delegate, quoted by the Egyptian Gazette, said 
     Muslim countries ``were among those that contributed most to 
     this process.'' one reason for the Iranians' popularity among 
     some Western delegations was that in their view the Islamic 
     position on abortion proved more nuanced than the Vatican's.
       Egypt's chief Islamic cleric, Grand Mufti Mohamed Said 
     Tantawy, stressed that while Islamic scholars and jurists 
     have declared abortion wrong, they have also said it is 
     permissible when a mother's life is in danger. In an 
     interview Tantawy said he believes that abortion is neither 
     fully permissible nor fully forbidden in Islam, but that each 
     case should be decided ``one by one, each on its own 
     merits.''
       Tantawy went on to say that the Cairo conference 
     exemplified Islamic traditions of tolerance, diversity of 
     opinions, and intellectualism--traditions he said Muslim 
     extremists have ignored by embracing a political fanaticism 
     that ``is not real Islam.''

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