Muslim Voices Promoting Islamic Non Violent Solutions - article collection

compiled by Sheila Musaji

Muslims all over the world have spoken out loudly against violence and terrorism.  They have not been able to stem the tide in a world filled with injustice any more than any other religious group has been able to stem the tide.

Muslims have not only spoken out against specific criminal acts and against political organizations such as Al Qaeda, they have also spoken for spiritual and non violent solutions - dialogue and peace. 

These are voices that need to be heard and amplified.  Who even among Muslims have heard of Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Mubarak Awad?  The tragedy is that such voices just don’t sell newspapers.

We will attempt to collect these voices and add to this collection regularly.

UPDATE 9/2009

The first of the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) is a Jihad Against Violence: Muslim Women’s Struggle for Peace.  The group is headed by Daisy Khan and based in New York City.  Daisy Khan says that it is Time for a Women’s Jihad Against Violence.

UPDATE 4/28/2011

Recently, there have been a few important new articles on Islam and non-violence.

An excellent article Islam’s Nonviolent Tradition by Michael Shank and just published in The Nation, includes the following:

Khan’s campaign, while reinforced by religious rigor, was also strategically brilliant, quickly garnering global attention. Then, as now, the international community cried foul as it watched the British respond to the Red Shirts with a Qaddafi-like retribution: bombing, killing, torturing, castrating, raping, poisoning and drowning the Khidmatgars. Unsurprisingly, then, as now, a quizzical world questioned the relationship between Islam and nonviolence, to which Khan quickly countered, “There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan [Pashtun] like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Mecca.”

Khan was intentional about sourcing his nonviolent teachings and inspiration in the Koran, a practice his grandson Asfandyar Wali Khan continues to this day as head of the Awami National Party in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (recently renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkwa). The preamble to the party’s platform, in fact, is an unequivocal commitment to the principles of nonviolence, the teachings of Khan and the cause of the Khidmatgars.

Beyond Pakistan, the raison d’être of Khan’s red-shirted revolution still resonates, as protests of equal proportion and

• Permalink