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Dur�n, Dur�n
Karen Yourish, New York
 COURTESY AJC. |
Khalid Dur�n is a marked man. A few weeks ago, Sheikh Abdulmunem Abu Zant, a leader of Jordan's militant Islamic Action Front, charged him with apostasy and called for his death.
Dur�n's crime? Writing a book subtitled "An Introduction to Islam for Jews" that doesn't quite toe the party line.
Dur�n, a German citizen with a PhD in Islamic studies, now living in suburban Washington, is a liberal Muslim scholar who received his religious training from a number of teachers and spent time at an Islamic seminary in Pakistan during his late teens.
The primer was released in May with a companion volume, on Judaism for Muslims, as part of a project of the American Jewish Committee intended to foster mutual understanding and respect between the two religions (see box, opposite). Dur�n's effort seems to have done anything but that.
While the Judaism text is more of a straightforward handbook, Dur�n's volume is a stinging indictment of what he sees as the growing danger of extremist Muslim political ideology (termed "Islamism" since the 1970s). Dur�n - one of the few Muslim intellectuals willing to speak out against Islamism - has long been a thorn in the side of the more radical elements. And Abu Zant's call for his blood, in a periodical calling itself Al-Shahid, is just the most recent manifestation of what appears to be a concerted campaign by some U.S. Muslim groups to discredit him.
Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington-based advocacy group, asked the AJC to postpone publication of the volume on Islam after just seeing its table of contents on the Committee's website, saying it read "like a laundry list of stereotypes and hot-button issues." The article in which the fatwa appeared basically reiterates CAIR's objections to the book, as do others that have appeared in the Arab press, in periodicals such as Al-Zaitonah, published in the U.S. by the Islamic Association for Palestine, and the Cairo-based Al-Wafd. Among the charges asserted in these articles are that Dur�n's book claims the wearing of the veil promotes infidelity, and that he offers a distorted view of female circumcision. In fact, Dur�n merely challenges veil-wearing as perhaps outdated, and tries to shed light on the falsely held assumption that female circumcision is an Islamic tradition.
For years, these groups have challenged Dur�n on everything from his name - which they say is fabricated - to whether he's even an adherent of Islam. They point to his collaborations with Steven Emerson, a journalist who follows militant Islamic groups, on the 1994 film "Jihad in America," and with the outspoken pro-Israel professor Daniel Pipes.
"You've got to wonder what AJC's intent was in picking Dur�n - a guy who has no credibility in the Muslim community," says CAIR's spokesman, Ibraham Hooper. Some more liberal voices in the Muslim world disagree. Tashbih Sayyed, editor of the California-based Pakistan Today, a newspaper that has taken some unpopular stands within the community on Israel and other issues, believes Dur�n is a credible choice. He told The Report that by intimidating anyone who doesn't subscribe to their point of view, "extremist forces" like CAIR create the erroneous impression that they represent the popular will.
Hooper dismisses the notion that his group and others are extremist. "Why?" he asks. "Because we want to see increased Muslim spirituality all over the world?" Yet when asked for his organization's position on a statement of support for Hamas and Hizballah made by Abdurahman Alamoudi, former executive director of the American Muslim Council, at an October 2000 Washington rally co-sponsored by CAIR, Hooper equivocates. "You'll have to ask Alamoudi," he responds.
In asking the AJC to delay publication, CAIR offered to have "recognized scholars on Islam" review the book. The AJC regarded the overture as "preposterous," according to the project's executive editor, Dr. Stephen Steinlight, who said the book was vetted by a dozen or so Muslim scholars. He calls "laughable" CAIR's attempt "to pass itself off as an arbiter of scholarly accuracy."
BORN IN GERMANY IN 1940 TO a father of Moroccan descent and a German mother, Dur�n moved to Spain at age two months. "There is no secret to my identity," Dur�n says. The name on his birth certificate, he says, is Detlev Khalid-Dur�n, in accordance with the Hispanic tradition that combines the mother's and father's family names. He never liked his German first name, and eventually dropped it to become Khalid Dur�n.
Though today not strictly observant, Dur�n was raised as a traditional Sunni Muslim, and says he has a deep sense of faith. He received intensive Islamic training during a summer in Sarajevo, in 1955, under the tutelage of Hafiz Kamil Silajdzic, an Islamic scholar who later became the grand imam at the city's principal mosque.
Dur�n first began to spar with Muslim fundamentalists while studying for his doctorate at the Free University, in Berlin, when the local Muslim Brotherhood forced the closure of an Islamic center he had helped found. "I was shocked," Dur�n recalls. "They pretended they were concerned about true religion, faith, etc., but they really just didn't want any organization but their own to exist. It was - and still is - about control and power."
In the 1970s, after receiving his PhD, Dur�n worked in Pakistan for the country's Islamic Research Institute during the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, but left in 1975 because of infighting between moderates and Islamists. Bhutto (who was later executed, after a military coup), says Dur�n, had a plan to ban the Islamist Party, but "gave in" to Saudi pressure.
In 1986, after a spell at the Free University's Institute for Iranian Studies (where he organized a hearing on human rights violations under Iran's Islamic regime), Dur�n made his first foray into the U.S. university system, as a professor of Islamic studies at Temple University. He has subsequently held a number of other year-long appointments, but has never been able to secure tenure and - citing an influx of funds from pro-Islamist sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan - believes he's been blacklisted from teaching again in the U.S. because most Middle Eastern studies departments are in the pockets of fundamentalist sympathizers. This view is shared by Temple religion professor Leonard Swidler, who brought Dur�n to the university. Dur�n has failed to land a tenured job, he says, only because "most of the people running the Mid-East studies departments want to keep anyone with a critical thought about Islam off the agenda."
"NO, CYNTHIA IS NOT HERE right now," Dur�n squeaks into the phone, imitating his 14-year-old daughter's friend on the other end of the line. Sitting with him on the balcony of his modest garden apartment in suburban Washington, which he shares with his wife, daughter and mother-in-law, you'd never have the impression he's living under a death threat. In fact, Dur�n seems more concerned about the safety of the Islamic scholar he asked to translate "Children of Abraham" into Arabic. "I feel responsible," he explains. "I got him into this."
Still, Dur�n knows too well the lethal consequences of provoking political opponents. Many of his like-minded reformer friends have been assassinated, and he admits it's somewhat amazing that he's still alive. On April 10, 1983, Issam Sartawi, the European coordinator for the PLO, who had proposed a dialogue with Israel, was shot dead in a Lisbon hotel by an operative from the Abu Nidal PLO splinter group. Dur�n was standing next to him. A number of colleagues who helped him organize the 1982 conference on Iranian human rights violations have also been killed, including Ali Mecili, an Algerian lawyer, and Kazem Rajavi, an Iranian lawyer.
The groups challenging Dur�n's credibility are skilled at staying on message. For its part, CAIR seems to dismiss everything Dur�n says as total fabrication. "The amazing thing about these people is that they lie in such detail," Hooper states, when asked about some of the well-documented assassinations of various reformist friends of Dur�n. As for the fatwa, Hooper doesn't think it really exists. "I'll believe it when I see it." When asked why CAIR objected to the chapter on female circumcision in Dur�n's book, when he actually dispels the stereotype that it's a Muslim practice, Hooper denied the group had commented on the issue: "Have you seen our press release? Is there any mention of female circumcision?"
Yes, in fact, there is. When confronted with that, Hooper responded that his group didn't think the subject was appropriate "for a book whose stated intent is to promote understanding between the faiths." And when asked what he thought of the section on female circumcision now that the book had been published, Hooper acknowledged that he hadn't read it. "We're trying to get a copy of the book. We asked [the AJC] for a copy, and they refused to give it to us."
(July 16, 2001)
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