El Gordo wrote:

IF a small group of fanatical Christians had killed thousands of Hindus or Moslems in Mumbai, and the attempt to build a church in the vicinity would rile up the locals and cause angry op-eds in the papers there, which side would you come down on?

You know, that's a very odd analogy to select - aside from the fanciful notion that a group of fanatical Christians might spring up essentially out of nowhere in India - especially when you consider that we have Christian missionaries of different types active throughout the world, including in places where not just small groups of fanatical Christians, but the full force of Christian civilization has massively disrupted entire nations - slavery, genocide, colonization and resource larceny, military support for fantastically oppressive and kleptocratic regimes, and on and on, with an incalculable cost to local life and limb - and yet we still, and rightly, support the notion that Christians in those nations should be welcomed, that their message should be heard, that they should be treated with respect, that they should not as individuals be held responsible for what others did "in the name of" their religion, their values, their cultures, their interests.

As for what I would say, it would all depend on the actual facts, not the fancies. 10 years after an attack by weirdo Christian lunatics in Mumbai of all places, I would expect a delegation of mainstream Christians who denounced and opposed Christian terrorist fanaticism to be treated with respect, and, if there was an active community of Christians in the vicinity, to be allowed to build a community center with house of worship.

I won't speculate about how the people of other religions might act, since so much would depend on so many other factors that your analogy doesn't allow us to take into account. However, as a general rule, if those resisting a particular religious expression or personage stir up hatred against all believers on the basis of the actions of a few, then I'll oppose that opposition, regardless of the proximate cause of whatever controversy, or its location. That has been the main cause of my disgust with the conservative movement on this issue. My feelings might change some, perhaps from disgust to mere disagreement, if a single major voice in the rightwing opposition to the GZ Mosque rebuked Pamela Geller, Andy McCarthy, Allen West, Rick Barber, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, et al for the paranoia and hatred they've stirred up and sought to exploit. Instead, at National Review, the Weekly Standard, at HotAir outside of yours truly when I was still blogging there: Silence, other than the occasional apology to stirred-up e-mailers for not denouncing Islam in even stronger terms.

For instance, we have a number of people just on this little thread on this little blog who have disagreed with me or sought to insult me. Not one has looked at the Allen West quote, and the context - NRO/The Corner, day after their vicious and dishonest editorial - and said, "Yes, that's wrong," and that NR should be ashamed of itself for promoting it.

The problem that the GZM opposition has is that they can't defend their position through reason and an appeal to authentic American values. Sooner or later they always stand on a pathological fear and hatred of Muslims - Islamophobia - "understandable" or not. It alone seems to explain why we have a Muslim leader and his associates asking to join the national community in the interest of mutual understanding and acceptance, and making a strong gesture against the sectarianism of the people who really are responsible for 9/11, but being rejected and denounced in terms which, if he were to recognize them, would be to admit that he, his beliefs, and his community really were offensive, indecent, and dangerous.

George Jochnowitz wrote:

punctuation–shmunctuation.

¡For shame

Who said it was about Sufism?

What's tedious is that you're stuck on your own personal determination to expose the threat, yet refuse or are unable to engage seriously on any other aspect of the discussion, or for that matter to view the threat in any context other than a very limited one, tied to a notion you can never quite nail down, but in which you seem to pretend to possess a greater command of all potentially security- and safety-related issues than the NYC police and others in positions of responsibility.

And I really don't know why you bathe your brain in material of the kind at that link.

Ittihad ≠ Ijtihad

Ittihad = a word for group or union or even team - I wasn't familiar with it until now - with an interesting political history, but a rather benign parallel history as well. It refers to, say, soccer teams in Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc. (that have no generally known connection to genocide). In the Turkic political sphere, it seems to have had at one time a very similar sense to that of the Italian word "fascio," which was originally a neutral term for "group," but eventually became the root word for a particular type of political practice and a set of interrelated ideological stances.

It doesn't seem to have much to do with Ijtihad. The material in block quotes is from the Wikipedia entry:

Ijtihad = the Arabic word for "interpretation" - or, to be more precise "

a technical term of Islamic law that describes the process of making a legal decision by independent interpretation of the legal sources, the Qur'an and the Sunnah.

It has a very interesting etymology and set of connotations:

The word derives from the three-letter Arabic verbal root of ج-ﻫ-د j-h-d (jahada, "struggle"), the same root as that of jihad; the t is inserted because the word is a derived stem VIII verb. The shared etymology is worth noting, as both words touch on the concepts of struggle or effort. In the case of form VIII verbs, this means to "struggle with oneself", as through deep thought. Ijtihad is a method of legal reasoning that does not rely on the traditional schools of jurisprudence (madhabs).

Your confusion on this allusion suggests to me that you don't always read the posts you react to. "The Gates of Ijtihad Are Closed" is a famous statement referring to the Ghazalian foreclosure of new independent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. I discussed it in connection to oceanaris' dual Ghazalianism: oceanaris seems to be as Ghazalian about his own beliefs as he is about Islamic ones, and apparently cannot imagine a valid orientation toward his own beliefs or toward beliefs in general that is other than "closed" in this way, thus his hostility to "revisionism, relativism, and deconstruction," three typical modes of attacking intellectual authoritarianism.

(I'm using a simplistic, vulgar, and reductive definition of what I'm calling Ghazalianism, since my understanding of Ghazali is based almost entirely on secondary/summary literature. Yet the historical-intellectual drama and turning point described by Ansary and others looks very right to me. If I wasn't having a Hegel Summer, I might have a Ghazali/Rushd Summer instead.)

miguel cervantes wrote:

you compare to the term for the Armenian genocide by the young Turks,

?