Christine Douglass-Williams - The Challenge of Modernizing Islam: Reformers Speak Out and the Obstacles They Face

Praise for The Challenge of Modernizing Islam

This well-written book should not be ignored. With elegance and determination, Christine Douglass-Williams documents a variety of Muslim reformers, of a wide range of backgrounds and persuasions. These courageous men and women should be as well-known as human rights dissidents Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were during the Cold War. Through a series of probing interviews and careful reflection, Douglass-Williams draws out the nature of reformers inner struggles and ideals, contrasting them with the beliefs of Islamists. This book is highly recommended for those wishing to learn more about Muslim reformers, and it is a must-read for U.S. policymakers who wish to understand the challenge of Islamism in America and the world today.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Founder of the AHA Foundation

Incisive and informed, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam by Christine Douglass-Williams offers us the powerful insight needed to launch a new conversation about Islam. It fills the mind with deep knowledge and urgent necessity.

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust and The Farhud

My library contains a wall of books about modern Islam. But hardly a one of them covers the topic of this important study by Christine Douglass-Williams.She also helps establish this movement as a serious intellectual endeavor, putting contemporary modernizers on the map as never before, thereby boosting their cause. Given the global threat of Islamism, that is a constructive, indeed a great, achievement.

From the Foreword by Daniel Pipes

The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is extraordinary, refreshing, and much needed. The interviews that Christine Douglass-Williams conducts with some of the leading moderate Muslim spokesmen in the United States and Canada are unique in their probing honesty. Douglass-Williams also provides illuminating ways for readers to avoid hazards that have misled numerous analysts of Islam and its prospects for reform. The Challenge of Modernizing Islam uniquely equips readers to make an informed and intelligent evaluation of how peaceful the future of non-Muslim countries is likely to be.

From the Foreword by Robert Spencer

2017, 2019 by Christine Douglass-Williams

Forewords 2017 by Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer

Preface 2019 by Christine Douglass-Williams

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New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2017 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

First paperback edition published in 2019.

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-64177-020-0

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Douglass-Williams, Christine, author.

Title: The challenge of modernizing Islam : reformers speak out and the obstacles they face / by Christine Douglass-Williams ; with forewords by Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer.

Description: New York : Encounter Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017017617 (print) | LCCN 2016058766 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039393 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781594039409 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: ReformersIslamic countriesInterviews. | Islamic renewal. | Islam and politics.

Classification: LCC BP70 .D69 2017 (ebook) | LCC BP70 (print) | DDC 297.09/051dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017617

Interior page design and composition: BooksByBruce.com

This book is dedicated to my joy and my heart, my daughter Natasha Leigh Williams

CONTENTS

by Dr. Daniel Pipes

by Robert Spencer

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

July 31, 2018

Since The Challenge of Modernizing Islam first appeared, I have been targeted by the Liberal Government of Canada for doing what the Muslims I profile in the book are doing: standing up against Islamic jihad violence, Muslim Brotherhood stratagems, and the oppression that is justified by the Sharia.

On December 19, 2017, I was terminated from the Board of Directors of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) by the Queens Privy Council, on the advice of the Heritage Minister of Justin Trudeaus government in Canada, Melanie Joly, who was moved to a Tourism portfolio in July 2018 during a cabinet shuffle.

My termination came four months after I received a threatening letter from Joly about my writings on political Islam for the online publication Jihad Watch, directed by Robert Spencer and a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in California.

I was appointed to the CRRF in 2012 under the Conservative Stephen Harper government, and reappointed in 2015. The CRRF was switched from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration over to the Department of Heritage after Justin Trudeau was elected as Prime Minister of Canada in 2015. Trudeau also immediately shut down the Office of Religious Freedom of which I served as an external advisor. The office, which denounced draconian blasphemy laws globally, was deemed by the Liberals to have favored one religion over another. It was originally dedicated to Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian who was minister of minorities in Pakistan who openly opposed Pakistans blasphemy laws and was assassinated for doing so by Islamic extremists.

I personally make a distinction between those Muslims who choose to practice Islam in peace and with respect for the separation from mosque and state, and those with their agenda to usurp democratic constitutions, demand special privileges over other creeds, and attack innocent people as a supremacist entitlement. I make this distinction clear in the pages of this book.

It is odd to be removed from a race-relations foundation for my private work in criticizing the intolerance, supremacism, and range of abuses that are characteristic of political Islam, particularly in light of the fact that Islam is not a race. I was made a public example as Canada marches to the orders of Muslim Brotherhood operatives. Canadas Motion M103 was passed, just as action against my position with the CRRF was unfolding.