Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

On the myth that the Quran forbids friendship with non-Muslims

Since I'm blogging up a storm tonight, I direct your attention to this useful discussion of "Friendship with Non-Muslims according to the Qur'an" by Afroz Ali of the Australian Al-Ghazzali Centre for Islamic Sciences and Human Development.

This is a topic about which one hears so much utter drivel today, so Br. Ali's short but thougthful and pretty systematic overview of Quranic verses relating to social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims is very handy and enlightening.

The article shows that contrary to the conventional wisdom among Islamophobes and hardline Islamists today, the Quran "allows and recognizes friendship on the basis of common interest, dignity, understanding and respect, with whoever exercises these commendable human qualities." The verses customarily cited as proof of enmity between Islam and Christianity or Judaism do not concern friendship at all, but refer to the dangers of over-dependency on outsiders in a time of  great religious conflict.

Also, as a fan of puns, I note approvingly that this center publishes a "ghazzette".

Rednecks and the Eid Stamp

Sabiwabi pointed out a new and sure-fire way of gauging redneck-itude.* Being up in arms about the Eid stamp. 

My point isn't that everyone can be reasonably expected to welcome it with open arms in these contentious times. In our ever changing society with all its competing worldviews and lifestyles, to find all developments in cultural and social life to be equally welcome would seem more likely a sign of a cognitive disorder than tolerance or enlightenment.  If a person is ambivalent or even downright uncomfortable with what they perceive Islam or Muslim culture to be --as many undoubtedly well meaning non-Muslim observers today are (thanks IMO as much to sensationalized and dumbed-down media coverage as to the actual conflicts that wrack modern life)--I can't blame her for greeting the Eid Stamp with indifference or even a bit of anxiety. It's not unlike how a person from a previous, less culturally eclectic generation of American might react to the sight of bilingual English/Spanish signs in the hospital, seeing them as the latest evidence of his side losing a zero-sum game for cultural influence. 

Still, it is one thing to be dismayed by cultural or demographic developments one finds unwelcome and another to neurotically view them as an existential threat to Ma, Dad and apple pie.  The latter reaction signals intense prejudice in the overwhelming majority of cases.

An aside: There was a time when one could reasonably have argued that anti-Muslim sentiment didn't warrant being cast as a "phobia" in American life, but, boy, are those halcyon days long gone. The paranoia and prejudice polluting our culture today about Islam (whether it be the latest conspiracy theory about the Eid Stamp** or this bizarre hoax among Islam-bashers about Hamas and pedophilia ) is only getting more shrill and psychologically disturbed.

It's ironic: The people most likely to object to comparisons between Muslims and Jews in terms of prejudice are busy undermining their case and making that comparison seem ever more commonsensical and uncontroversial. With our air thick with all this of hate and fear, how can a reasonably well informed person deny that, at least for some important segments of the Right, Muslims are indeed the new "Jews", second-class citizens to be marginalized and openly ridiculed? (Some--such as the  neo-Nazi British National Party--are already openly acknowledging that they have moved their cross-hairs off Jews and retrained them on Muslims.)

* With all due apologies to the many decent "rednecks" out there, some of whom I call kin.

** See Sheila Musaji's article for more.

Newsweek on the myth of "Eurabia"

There's an incisve analysis in the current issue of Newsweek of the flawed assumptions that go into alarmist "Eurabia" demographic-threat rhetoric we hear so often on the Far Right.

It points out that a lot of the numbers that get thrown around in this debate are not only pure speculation, but speculation by people with anti-immigration agendas.

Here's the crux of the article.  "Why Fears Of A Muslim Takeover Are All Wrong" by William Underhill (NEWSWEEK - Jul 20, 2009):

For the number of Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims by midcentury, it would require either breeding on a scale rarely seen in history or for immigration to continue at a pace that's now politically unacceptable. More likely, new controls will slow Muslim immigration. The birthrate for Muslim immigrants is also likely to continue to decline, as it has tended to do, with greater affluence and better health care. There is no Europewide data available, but one study says fertility rates among Turkish-born women in the Netherlands fell from 3.2 in 1990 to 1.9 in 2005, barely above the figure for native-born Dutch. Over the same period, the equivalent figure for Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands dropped from 4.9 to 2.9. Also, fertility rates are edging upward in some Northern European countries, which would offset some of the Muslim growth. Bottom line: given the number of variables, demographers are loath to make predictions about the number of Muslims in Europe in the years to come. "You would almost have to make it up," says Carl Haub, the senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. And the idea of a Muslim majority any time soon? "Absolutely absurd."

Read the whole thing. It covers a lot of ground.

HT: Indigo Jo

Sherman Jackson on WDM, divisions among Black Muslims, and the road ahead

As a commenter astutely noted, not all Black Muslims in this country looked to W.D. Mohammed for leadership. Many assimilated fully into mainstream, majority-immigrant mosques and institutions, in some cases going abroad for traditional training, as well.

Dr. Sherman Jackson, one of the most important North American Muslim jurists, scholars and community leaders--not to mention the author of an extremely important book on American Islam --has penned a fascinating reflection (posted on the old faithful Manrilla Blog) about Imam W.D. Mohammed's legacy and the complicated relationship he and the community he led often had with other Black Sunni Muslims.

It illustrates a very important aspect that I left unmentioned, partly out of a sense of my "place"  and in the interest of space. The worst scorn and sniping often came from fellow Blacks, not immigrants.

Dr. Jackson doesn't make this point, but personally I think it's fair to say that this is partly due to the disproportionate role long played by Wahhabism in one form or another in non-WDM urban mosques. Not because they "infiltrated" inner cities, but 1) because their strict, cut & dried approach naturally appeals to those who feel their world has gone to Hell in a handbasket (not unlike the militant preaching one regularly encounters at urban, "front-line" churches) and 2) they were willing to invest in desperately need urban Islamic infrastructure when others weren't (even if said funding sometimes came with Faustian conditions).

For many years in urban Muslim life, the Muslim community was tri-polar, with the most prominent Islamic culturo-religious institutions on the ground being in the orbit of either WDM's community, Wahhabism or the Nation of Islam. There have no doubt always been many individual exceptions and some local anomalies (e.g., the Naqshabandis under Sheikh Kabbani in Los Angeles, whom I think had some success in reforming some gangbangers, getting them to if you will exchange the 40 Ounce for dhikr), but I think those have been the organizational players in urban Islam on the national stage. (Incidentally, I've seen claims of Shia inroads in some places. If anyone has info, please chime in.)

That's not to say (as Azhar Usman's moving apology shows), that he consistently got the respect he deserved within majority-immigrant communities, but more often than not when immigrant leaders contributed to this problem it was in a more passive manner, whether damning with faint praise or just cold ignoring him entirely (presumably simply out of ignorance in many cases). When he and his community were openly attacked, to the contrary, it often usually by other Blackamerican Muslims, and some really went for the jugular.

Only a few years ago, I was shocked to see, on a mailing list of Muslim grad students and academics, a knowledable and traditionally trained Muslim grad student who was Black quip brazenly that the "W.D." might stand for "Weak Deen". At the time, I went ballistic and made rather pointed comparisons between WDM's accomplishments on the ground in American society and those of most prominent immigrant Muslim leaders who sniffed at the homespun delivery of his message. Hopefully, such slights will no longer be socially acceptable after this outpouring in his honor.

The Manrilla Blog | Life. Art. Religion. Culture. » Imâm W. D. Mohammed and The Third Resurrection by Dr. Sherman Jackson

I remember Philadelphia in the late 70s and early 80s, when Imam Mohammed was in this midst of his history-making transition. Those of us converts who had been blessed with greater access to (what we thought was) traditional learning would deride the way members of the World Community of Al-Islam in the West recited al-Fâtihah, joke about how they gave salâms and relish their inability to keep up with us on all of the irrelevant minutia on which we so self-righteously prided ourselves. We were better than them; for we were real Sunnis, not half-baptist wannabes. For all our ‘knowledge,’ however, we were completely devoid of wisdom and even more ignorant of the Sunna of Muhammad (SAWS). Of course, our high-handed arrogance would produce over time an understandable counter-arrogance. To the Imam’s community, we were confused, self-hating Negroes, wannabe Arabs, fresh off the back of the bus onto the back of the camel. If what we displayed was what the so-called Islamic sciences were supposed to be about, they would have little use for them. Ultimately, this would lead to a quiet resentment, mistrust and even hostility, not only towards us but also towards the so-called Islamic tradition that we so dismally (mis)represented. Of course, there were those from Imam Mohammed’s community who managed to transcend some of this alienation. But this was far more the exception than it was the rule.

A touching tribute and a much needed plea for humility

Islamic comedian (and, no, that's not an oxymoron, or at least shouldn't be) Azhar Usman wrote a powerful, soul-searching tribute to Imam W.D. Mohammed after attending the great man's funeral. It lays bare the indignities and neglect that African-American Muslims have all too often endured at the hands of upwardly mobile and status-conscious immigrant (and Caucasian--see below) Muslims in North America.

Here is an excerpt from Br. Azhar's touching and much needed jeremiad against snobbery and ethnic chauvinism within the Muslim community in "An Apology: Heartfelt reflections on the passing of a legendary Blackamerican Muslim leader":

I would like to unburden myself of something that has been sitting like a ton of bricks on my heart for my entire life. I want to apologize to my Blackamerican brothers and sisters in Islam. I know that this apology may not mean very much; and I know that our American Muslim communities have a LONG way to go before we can have truly healthy political conciliation and de-racialized religious cooperation; and I know that I am not the one who is responsible for so much of the historical wrongdoing of so-called “immigrant Muslims”—wrongdoings that have been so hurtful, and insulting, and degrading, and disrespectful, and dismissive, and marginalizing, and often downright dehumanizing.

It's good to see that an up and coming leader like him not only gets the critical issues at stake here, but, masha'Allah, has the humility and courage to call us[*] out for not doing right by WDM and African-American Muslims in general. As people like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, fellow Muslim Dave Chappelle and even--if in his own apolitical, narcissistic way--Jerry Seinfeld  have demonstrated, comics are often the most insightful of social observers, so I'm not surprised.

I'm reminded of the great Christian theologian H. Richard Neibuhr, who fiercely attacked the phenomenon of denominationalism in American Prostestantism, which he saw if I'm not mistaken as the de facto re-imposition of Jim Crow-style segregation on American religious life. He understood, as we should, that consistently choosing to associate with "one's own kind" is only innocent and ethically neutral when all parties have the same access to resources and privilege that you enjoy (which is why, incidentally, minority-only institutions do not pose the same ethical quandry--members of majority groups do not need access to them to enjoy those basic rights, which they inherit by virtue of their background).

It's also heartening to see a discussion by a Muslim of the  ennobling power of apologies. A lot of Muslims today seem to think that apologies are a sign of weakness, when they quite to the contrary are its polar opposite. Real men--Ever notice how the Latin word "virtue"  essentially means manhood; vir is Latin for "man"--and real leaders apologize or at least know they ought to do so when they screw up, but I digress.

Putting aside the indeed sad and scandalous history of neglect of this great man and his inspiring community, the greatest lesson to be learned from his story IMO is that the guy with the grandiloquent khutbahs, perfectly nasalized Arabic and a stack of learned citations isn't always right. Unlike so many contemporary Muslims who seem to think that Pharisaic legalism is the sum of all virtue in Islam, Imam W.D. Mohammed didn't apologize for resorting to common sense when he encountered new challenges or found inherited customs designed for vastly different circumstances inadequate for the needs of his flock in an urban American milieu.

 May Allah bless him and forgive his sins and grant us all the wisdom and humility to learn from his example.

I also came across another tribute that is thought-provoking in a rather different way. It touches on how complex and far-reaching WDM's influence has been on Blackamerican Islam.  In his respectful assessment of WDM's achievements, Temple University professor Mark Lamont Hill points out in "R.I.P. Warith Deen Muhammad"  how some observers feel his embrace of Sunni Islam had the unintended effect of taking the wind of the sails of such movements as agents of political change.

In many ways, Warith Deen Mohammed’s ascendance within the ranks of American Islam marked the first major blow to the Nation of Islam’s power in America. As the son of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Warith Deen assumed the reigns of the organization after his father’s death in 1975. Soon after, he shifted the name and mission of the organization, slowly shifting it from a hybrid of Christianity, Islam, and Black Nationalism to a more mainstream form of Sunni Islam. For some, Warith Deen’s moves were a literal godsend to Black Muslims in America, redirecting them from hatred and heresy (their words, not mine!) to a newfound place of truth, orthodoxy, and global community. To others, Mohammed took the political and cultural teeth out of the Black Muslim movement, effectively undermining the extraordinary work of Elijah Muhammad, one of the most influential, innovative, and woefully underappreciated figures in American history. At the end of the day, neither description fully captures the complexity and significance of Warith Deen Muhammed. 

Emphasis added.  I have nothing but good things to say about about the Imam's impact, but it's interesting to see how differently WDM's transformation of NOI can look to people in other strands of Black Nationalism.

Yikes, it's 3 AM. I am going to be a zombie for sehri in, gulp, 2 hours.  Ah, the wicked wages of late-night blogging. My sins will be punished by my 2 1/2 year old when she jumps out of bed, ready to rumble, at 7:30 AM sharp.

[* ] By "us", that I mean Euro-American Muslims no less than those of immigrant extraction. Discussions of the tragic immigrant/black divide within the Muslim community often leave the impression that Euro-Americans are somehow  unimplicated in all this, which I think is reactionary hogwash. Far from being above the fray, most of us white Musilms are just as eager to move up the social totem pole towards "authentic" (read: foreign) Muslim-ness and distance ourselves socially from from those allegedly less traditional majority-African-American communities.

Unlike them, we arrive in the Muslim community with all the social benefits of whiteness and in any case are afforded the opportunity to assimiliate into and align ourselves with one of the traditional ethnic blocs that dominate the community. And most of us avail ourselves of that of that option with gusto, high-tailing it to the suburban, immigrant doctor and engineer-led mosques as soon as we find their coordinates.

"White flight" meets the Ummah.

Round-up of coverage of Imam W.D. Mohammed's passing

Here are, in no particular order, some recent blog postings and articles in the MSM on the death and/or moving funeral of Imam W.D. Mohammed. (In a one or two cases, the post was very short, so I linked more for the comments.)

Islamosphere:

1. Zahed Amanullah. "The Imam Cares" (alt.muslim)
2. Seeker's Digest: "Passing of Imam WD Mohammed - The Death of a Great Leader of Islam in the West"
3. Islamicate: "Warith Dean Mohammed is Dead"
4. SaqibSaab at Muslim Matters: "Thoughts After Attending The Janazah of Imam W. D. Mohammed" [Reflections by an American Muslim of immigrant background.]
5. Rickshaw Diaries: "RIP: Imam W. Deen Muhammad"
6. Koonj:  "Imam Warith Deen Muhammad: a leader among leaders"
7. Just Another Angry Black Muslim Woman? "Death of a Pioneer: Warith Deen Muhammad October 30, 1933-Sept.9, 2008"
8. SunniSister: Imam Warith Deen
9. ThirdResurrection: w.d. mohammed dies
10. Tariq Nelson: "W Deen Mohammed 1933-2008"
11. Akram's Razor (moi):  "Imam W.D. Mohammed has left us" 
12. Azhar Usman: "An Apology: Heartfelt reflections on the passing of a legendary Blackamerican Muslim leader" [A must read!]
13. Dynamite Soul: "A word about Imam Warith Deen Mohammad"
14. Imam Zaid Shakir:  "Imam Warith Deen Muhammad (1933-2008)"
15. Sisterdoc: "Peace and Blessings Imam W.D. Mohammed-R.I.P."
16. The Manrilla Blog:  "Imâm W. D. Mohammed and The Third Resurrection by Dr. Sherman Jackson" [A must read!]
    

 Rest of the Blogosphere:

1. Mata H at Blogher: "The death of Imam W. Deen Mohammed and 'A Summit on Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul'"
   [Talks about how beloved the Imam was in interfaith circles.]
   
2. David Waters: "W.D. Mohammed's Spiritual Maturity" (On Faith, The Washington Post's religion blog)
3. Marc Lamont Hill: "R.I.P. Warith Deen Muhammad"
   [Interesting reflections on the political consequences of WDM's embrace of religion over  ideology for not only the Nation of Islam but  Blackamerican Islam in general). ]
4. John Esposito: "W.D. Mohammed: A Witness for True Islam"  (On Faith, The Washington Post's  religion blog)
5. A. Serwer: "W.D. Mohammed Dies" (Tapped, group blog of The American Prospect)

MSM:

1. Michelle Gallardo. "Prayer services for Imam W. D. Mohammed" (a Chicago TV station)
2. Margaret Ramirez and Noreen Ahmed-Ullah. "Thousands gather in Villa Park for funeral of Imam W. Deen Mohammed" (Chicago Tribune)
3. Margaret Ramirez, Manya A. Brachear and Ron Grossman.
   
4. "Muslim America's rebellious son" (The Chicago Tribune) 
5. Sophia Tarteen: "Former Nation of Islam leader W.D. Mohammed dies" (Associated Press)
6. Niraj Warikoo: "Muslim leader Warith Deen Mohammed dies" (FREEP)
7. Patricia Sullivan: "W.D. Mohammed; Changed Muslim Movement in U.S." (Washington Post)
8. Time Online: "Imam W. D. Mohammed: influential US Sunni Muslim leader"
9. Malise Ruthven: "Imam who succeeded his father as leader of the Nation of Islam" (The Guardian)
10. Salim Muwakkil (brief interview on NPR's "Tell Me More")

Misc.

1. A guest book dedicated to the memory of Imam W.D. Mohammed
2. An audio recording of the Muslim Journal's press conference
   
3. "This Far by Faith: Warith Deen Muhammad" , an episode of a PBS series on great religious leaders dedicated to WDM
4. Taylor Branch: "The Anointed Son: The story behind W.D. Mohammed's momentous break with his father and his alliance with Malcolm X."  (Beliefnet)
5. A bio of WDM at an Atlanta mosque.

Please let me know if I've overlooked something worthwhile, folks.

Back to slinging C#.

P.S. I will continue to update this as I find new links.

P.P.S. My apologies for not giving hat tips for some of these. I've looked at so many blogs over the last few days and done so many web searches that I simply can't keep track of where I found what.  Feel free to help yourself to mine.

Imam W.D. Mohammed has left us

If you haven't heard, I'm sorry to inform you that a great American leader has left us.  Imam Warith Deen Mohammed passed away yesterday.  May Allah grant him paradise, give strength to his family and comfort the many who will be devastated by his departure from this plane.

Imam Mohammed is best known outside the Muslim community for courageously repudiating the racialized theology of the original Nation of Islam and leading its community into Sunni Islam after he took over its leadership upon the death of his father, Elijah Muhammad.

But that's just the beginning of the story. It's not a story I could do any justice, so let me just say since that fateful day he has, I think, been the preeminent African American Muslim leader, one of America's most important spiritual leaders, and the often unsung (not to mention occasionally maligned) hero of Muslim integration into American life (e.g., he gave the first Islamic prayer in the U.S. Senate, in 1990).

Imam Mohammed was a leader in the fullest sense of the word, and he took a lot of heat for it. (The sniping against him always outraged me.) Back when many prominent North American Muslim leaders were, let's face it, high on various sterile imported ideologies that impair one's rational faculties and narrow one's vision of the human family, Imam Mohammed was preaching his own--if I may borrow a metaphor from a leading voice of reform today-- "radical middle way". He was promoting common sense, moderation and dialogue at a time when none of these were politically correct in wide swathes of the community.  He didn't fall for all this pseudo-intellectual junk theology that so many of us are still painfully shaking off today.

As we celebrate this humble, unassuming man's momentous achievements we'd be remiss not to pause and ponder how so many of his once vocal critics have either been consigned to the dust bin of history (for example, these jokers, or these schizophrenic dinosaurs) or have been forced by history to hastily reinvent themselves in his mold in recent years (e.g., yesterday's critics of Muslim involvement with  democracy and the "Kuffar" who are today's most eager participants in post-9/11 interfaith dialogue).  No one is perfect, we all have our limitations, and no leader can avoid mistakes, but overall he was far ahead of his time--he got the biggest challenges facing American Muslims before they were even on the radar screen of many other leaders who took him to task for dogmatic technicalities--while so many of those who attacked him were, in contrast, holding theirs back.

Granted, for years he has been rightly praised across the spectrum of Muslim America, but it's a shame it took, as the saying goes, so long for this prophet to be fully accepted by his own people. Imagine how much good he could have done if all these  more "learned" traditional scholars and leaders that gave him (and the balanced and dynamic community he led) short shrift for so long had had the humility to give serious thought to his deceptively simple and profound vision of common sense, dialogue and down-home ihsan, say, a decade earlier?

Inna lillahi wa innaa ilayhi rajioon. From God we come and to Him we return.

His janaza (funeral) service will be streamed live today by the Muslim Journal at 1:45 PM Central Time.

The number of Muslims in Congress has doubled

Indiana just elected a Muslim to Congress in a special election.

Second Muslim elected to Congress - Yahoo! News

Indiana voters on Tuesday elected a Muslim to Congress, only the second of that faith chosen in U.S. history. Andre Carson, grandson of the late Democrat Rep. Julia Carson, was elected to serve the balance of her term in the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election. She died in December 2007, after serving 11 years in the heavily Democratic district. The younger Carson, 33, a member of the Indianapolis City Council who converted to Islam about a decade ago, will serve out the remainder of his grandmother's term through calendar 2008. He beat Republican Jon Elrod and a third party candidate with 52 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Elrod.

Good news, but I really dislike this phenomenon of spouses and children inheriting" offices from deceased politicians. Blood doesn't confer qualifications or experience.

It's practically feudal. Our political culture is supposed to be more evolved than that.

What, we still have an Electoral College? Touché, I stand corrected. I guess this makes perfect sense.

[HT: Amad]

Hank Hanegraaff on "Misconceptions about Muslims"

Came across some refreshingly evenhanded and principled comments on Islam from an evangelical Christian perspective  ("Misconceptions About Muslims - equip.org")  by noted American Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff (a.k.a. the "Bible Answer Man").

While he doesn't name names, he implicitly repudiates the ignorance and hysteria  concerning Islam that have become practically de rigueur on the Christian Right today. Many (most?) of his  colleagues have embraced slander and dehumanizing innuendo that aren't very becoming in "Christians" worth the name, and Hanegraaff clearly understands how hypocritical and ultimately counterproductive such cheap tactics are.

I've often listened to his radio show over the years and have always found it stimulating and informative, even if I occasionally have problems with his hermeneutic stance (in a nutshell, IMHO he occasionally forgets his erudition and lapses into the "I-don't-interpret-scripture" fallacy that plagues so much evangelical thinking).

Islam's rarely been a topic on his show in my experience, but whenever it has arisen I have found his comments admirably balanced. In the excerpt--which is a tantalizingly short 2 minutes in length--he makes some profound points that a lot of people in his community desperately need to ponder these days.

The truth, not ill-informed trash-talking, shall set us all free. May more of his colleagues on Christian radio discover this elementary Christian value.

If the FBI could conceal evidence in order to paint MLK as dangerous...

A few months ago I blogged about a disturbing case in the 1960s that has come to light of FBI officials conspiring to send somebody to jail for a crime they knew they hadn't committed.

Here's more haunting food for thought from the witch hunts of a previous and far more geopolitically tense era about vague accusations of Islamic extremism.

In the late 1960s, elements in the government (i.e., the FBI) deliberately withheld evidence that would have exonerated the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. of charges emanating from the Right of him being a Communist plant.

The FBI and Martin Luther King (The Atlantic Monthly):

The transcripts from the wiretaps on King and his advisers also answer a question that came to preoccupy President Lyndon Johnson just as it had the Kennedy brothers and J. Edgar Hoover: Was Martin Luther King Jr. any kind of Communist sympathizer? Of course not—but the FBI never passed along to Johnson or to anyone else what King said to Bayard Rustin one day in early May of 1965, when the SCLC was tussling with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over a public statement proclaiming movement unity: "There are things I wanted to say renouncing Communism in theory but they would not go along with it. We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us but they wouldn't go along with it." Instead the FBI continued to distribute utterly misleading reports that declared just the opposite; as one newly released CIA summary from just a few weeks before King's death asserts, "According to the FBI, Dr. King is regarded in Communist circles as 'a genuine Marxist-Leninist who is following the Marxist-Leninist line.'"

Here we see the grave threat posed to due process and democracy by poorly informed, ideologically fringe and/or unaccountable security officials. Not only were the charges against MLK unproven, but there was clear evidence that he was innocent. Yet that didn't stop a government agency under the leadership of a hard line appointee from categorically asserting his guilt and hiding exculpatory evidence. King viewed the very theory of Communism as "alien philosophy" yet officials were free to brand him not only a Communist, but a committed Marxist-Leninist.

In our time of rampant fear, increasingly-socially santioned Islamophobia, and worrying ignorance on the part of government officials charged with sorting extremists from mainstream Muslims, it is not hard to imagine comparable ideologically motivated miscarriages of justice taking place today as constitutional safeguards are either ditched or declared intended for non-Muslims only like a segregated water fountain of old.

I'm reminded a bit of the US government's rather improbable seeming claims of terrorist links on the part of Tariq Ramadan. We are to accept on blind faith that unsubstantiated government claims that a man who spent decades doing interfaith dialogue and advocating controversial liberal religious reform is a closet terrorist and threat to national security. A far more likely scenario seems that some of Hoover's ideological and moral successors in the national security system are back to the old tricks.