"Moosa and the Madrassas"

by Winfield Myers  •  May 23, 2011 at 10:18 am

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2011/05/moosa-and-the-madrassas

Ebrahim Moosa

In "Moosa and the Madrassas," published yesterday at American Thinker, journalist Stephen Schwartz reports on a recent address at UC-Berkeley by Duke University professor of Islamic studies Ebrahim Moosa:

As Schwartz details, the aim of Moosa's talk was to whitewash the role of madrassas in spreading radical Islam:

In his "keynote lecture," Moosa reveled in a defense of Deobandism and its main madrassa, Dar Ul-Uloom Deoband, located in India. The title of his presentation was innocuous: "Norms in the Madrassa-Sphere: Between Tradition, Scripture, and the Public Good." Nevertheless, after an introduction by GTU Islamic Studies director and assistant professor Munir Jiwa, Moosa made clear early in his presentation that his aim was to cleanse the "narrative" on madrassas, in which, he claimed, madrassas have been "treated in [the] media with dread as a threat to Western security."

Moosa gave no ground to those who would argue that many madrassas, especially in South Asia, are centers for radical Islamist indoctrination. He dismissed in a passing reference reports that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief for whose capture the U.S. government has offered a $10-million reward as an accomplice of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, was a student at Dar Ul-Uloom Deoband. According to Moosa, Mullah Omar's involvement with the madrassa "caused Deoband to be identified with the Taliban," as if the association was trivial or manufactured by media. In reality, the murderous extremists in Afghanistan were inspired by Deobandism, and Mullah Omar was not the sole alumnus of its madrassa system among their ranks.

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