THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 51, February 20, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
INGRID MATTSON: NO LONGER LEADING ISNA,
BUT STILL ADVANCING RADICAL ISLAM
By Stephen Suleyman Schwartz
INGRID MATTSON'S CONTINUING IDEOLOGICAL COMMITMENT TO ISLAMISM: DEVOTION TO PUTTING
OUT THE FLAMES OF DISCONTENT OVER MILITANT ISLAM WHEREVER OPPOSITION TO ITS AMBITIONS MAY APPEAR --
DETERMINATION TO BUILD ON THE FAME SHE GAINED WHILE LEADING ISNA TO ADVANCE MILITANT ISLAM
WITH A NORTH AMERICAN FACE
FULL STORY:
Ingrid Mattson, Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut,
recently ended a term as the first female and first Muslim convert to serve as President of the Islamic Society of North
America (ISNA). But she promises to continue her career as a promoter of radical Islam.
As an example of her ideological commitment, Mattson is advertised as a prominent participant in a conference to be held
at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis/St. Paul on February 24-26, 2011. The conference program is breathtaking
in its triumphalist view of Islam and its relations with the world. Titled "Shared Cultural Spaces" and benefiting from a
grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) -- paid for by U.S. federal tax revenue -- the University of
Minnesota conference program announces very little that is "shared" by Islam and other cultures, but rather is replete
with uncritical glorification of Islamic history.
Thus, Nabil Matar, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, commented:
"At a time when other parts of the world were in their 'dark
ages,' in Islamic civilizations there were artists, scientists,
writers, and architects who created a world of imagination,
openness (as they included Christians and Jews, as well),
and brilliance. The conference will show how Islamic
cultural imagination continues to enrich contemporary life."
While such a claim is problematical in its exclusion of all non-Muslim intellectual achievements during the "dark ages," it is
absurd in its supposition that the Islamic imagination retains a leading role in global culture.
Mattson is included as a participant in the University of Minnesota conference based on her work in "Islamic law and
ethics, as well as gender and leadership issues in contemporary Muslim communities." These topics appear as euphemisms
for discussion of Sharia law and the status of women in Islam, the two issues in Muslim societies which are especially
controversial for non-Muslims. Such matters are outstanding in their relevance for the future of Islam, and a debate about
them involving Muslim leaders like Mattson is profoundly necessary.
But will Mattson, at an event sponsored by the federal NEH, address Sharia and the status of women in a candid way? Will
she illuminate the drive to expand Sharia as common law in the Muslim and non-Muslim lands, or the protests of Muslim
women and enlightened Muslim men against female subjection and victimization by such practices as socalled "honor"
murder and female genital mutilation (FGM)? While such atrocious patterns in the treatment of women do not originate in
Islam, they have been assimilated into its sociology in many parts of the world.
One may hope for Mattson to suddenly adopt a challenging attitude to retrograde legal and gender standards among
Muslims, but, judging from her long-established activities, such an expectation would surely bring disappointment.
Regarding Sharia, on January 29, 2011, Mattson journeyed to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where local voters statewide attempted to
vote in a ban on "considering or using" Islamic Sharia law or "international law" in state courts. While the Oklahoma
measure has been blocked by a federal court order, Mattson intended to "explain" Sharia at the 24th annual Knippa
Interfaith/Ecumenical Lecture Series at Grace Lutheran Church.
Many moderate Muslims around the world believe that Sharia, or religious law, is limited in its applicability to intimate
religious matters that do not impinge on or otherwise affect others, such as diet, male circumcision, forms of prayer and
other rituals, fasting, fixing of charity payments, and burial. But in her discussion of Sharia, in an interview with the
Tulsa World, prior to her lecture, Mattson defined Sharia according to the sweeping definition put forward by
Islamists: "Shariah means the sacred law, a whole set of approaches to living your life in a way that brings you closer to
God." She went on to include "business and medical ethics" as Sharia concerns. Indeed, questioned about Sharia and
homosexuality, Mattson commented gratuitously, "A bigger area of concern for many Muslims is financial law." She
then condemned financial practices barred by Islamic law, such as the reselling of debt, as "schemes that got us into this
recession." This intimation that Sharia-based finance offers a positive alternative, in the aftermath of the global
recession, is a dangerously demagogic aspect of her rhetoric and an extension to recent Islamist efforts to expand the
influence of Sharia-based economics.
When asked about Sharia and personal religious choice, such as conversion by Muslims to other faiths, Mattson
demonstrated her talent for untruthful improvisation by claiming, "Usually, Muslim scholars say it is sinful, but legal, to
convert." Unfortunately, "waiving" of Islamic legal prohibitions against conversion of born Muslims to differing
religions is visible only in limited areas, mainly in the West. Mattson's inventive assertion that Muslim scholars
"usually" treat conversion out of Islam as a violation of Muslim religious belief, but nevertheless permissible, is a
wholesale invention. The exact opposite is true: the great majority of Muslim scholars and believers continue to treat
departure from the religion or adoption of another faith as an offense meriting death. Considering the frequency with
which allegations of apostasy through conversion result in violent incidents across the Islamic lands, and the attention
given to them in global media, Mattson's insouciance on this issue is repugnant.
Mattson is nothing, if not diverse. She is described as an American Muslim when speaking to such U.S. periodicals as
the New York Times, and, having been born in Kitchener, Ontario, she is identified as a Canadian Muslim in such
north-of-the-border media as the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, published in the broad prairie province of
Saskatchewan.
Although her specific citizenship may be unknown, when she appeared as a Muslim representative at the inauguration
of Barack Obama, Mattson presumably acted as an American. Regardless of her citizenship, Mattson is consistent on
one important issue: the variety of Islam she has embraced, which, as represented by ISNA, is fundamentalist and
radical, oriented toward Saudi Wahhabism, Pakistani jihadism, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
ISNA itself avers on its official website that, "the Department of Justice named ISNA on a list of 'unindicted
co-conspirators' in the federal terrorism prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development." The
Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case ended in 2008 with the conviction of five HLF officials on 108 charges of supporting
a foreign terrorist organization, i.e. Hamas, as well as financial and tax violations.
Like Mattson, ISNA has equivocal origins, about which it has grown coy. Its website no longer features the
organization's foundation and history in a prominent place. Nevertheless, a look at ISNA's Facebook page reveals
information appearing on Wikipedia, identifying ISNA as created in 1982 and based in the Muslim Students'
Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), which was founded in 1963. By that account, "ISNA regards the MSA's 1963
convention as its first one." According to Washington Post reporter John Mintz, Egyptian-born, Qatar-based
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, perhaps the most famous fundamentalist preacher in Islamic lands, described, in a 1995 speech
delivered in Ohio, how supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood proposed to Islamize the U.S. through the activities of MSA
and ISNA. (Al-Qaradawi is now banned from entering the U.S.A. and Britain.)
Mattson's radical record includes endorsement of the "Islamic reformation" image projected by the adherents of Saudi
Wahhabism (even though Wahhabism is the theological inspiration for al-Qa'ida), false claims that Wahhabi clerics have
uniformly denounced terrorism, and denial that terrorist cells operate in the U.S.A. In the immediate aftermath of the
atrocities of September 11, 2001, Mattson joined in efforts by academia and media to distance Islam from terrorism. As
described by Washington Times religion writer Larry Witham in reportage published on September 24, 2001,
Mattson hurried to articulate the claim that armed jihad refers only to "defensive" combat. It is appalling that a leading
academic on Islam, with credibility in the White House and other exalted venues, should have supported this deliberate
falsification of Islamic history; armed jihad to spread Islam is a well-established concept in Muslim theology.
Mattson's views have not changed in the years since 9-11. With the recent end of her term as ISNA president, Mattson
remains devoted to putting out the flames of discontent over radical Islam wherever opposition to its ambitions may
appear. These efforts demonstrate Mattson's determination to build on the fame she gained while leading ISNA to
advance radical Islam with a North American face.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Islamist Fifth Column -- America's Internal Enemies:
Disloyalty, Subversion, Sedition, & Treason
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, an American journalist, columnist and author, is Executive Director of the Center for
Islamic Pluralism, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., and designed to promote "moderate Islam."
Schwartz, describing himself as a Jewish convert to the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, is a vocal critic of the ideology
of Islamism and an equally vocal critic of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. Originally an adherent of the political Far
Left, he currently identifies as a Neoconservative.
Schwartz was institutional historian of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004-2006. He wrote the foregoing article
for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
The foregoing article by Stephen Schwartz was originally published in the American Thinker, February 20, 2010,
and can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks
to define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(URL: http://www.meforum.org/2835/ingrid-mattson- isna-radical-islam)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
February 20, 2011
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