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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Stephen Schwartz
The Hartford Seminary has occupied a leading position among theological
faculties around the nation in accommodating Islam, particularly in its
radical forms, since appointing its first Muslim faculty member more than
twenty years ago. Today, that accommodation extends to the murderous regime
of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
Hartford maintains a highly questionable relationship with an Islamic
religious and Arabic-language school, the Al-Fatiha Islamic Academy in
Damascus, approved by, and allied with, the Assad family. Founded in 1956,
Al-Fatiha promotes aggressively sharia-based finance (Islamic banking) and
denounces the current international financial system.
On January 30, Hartford announced that "Omer Awass ... has been named
Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations,
starting in Fall 2012." Awass possesses unexceptional standing as a
doctoral candidate at Temple University, where he earned his master's degree
in religion, with attendance at al-Azhar, the prestigious Sunni Muslim
religious university in Cairo. And by way of justifying this rather odd
academic appointment, Hartford disclosed that Awass "is a graduate of Al-
Fatih Islamic Institute in Damascus, Syria, which has enjoyed a partnership
with Hartford Seminary and had students earn degrees at the Seminary."
Thus, at a time when the Assad regime has slain at least 11,000 of its
subjects, according to Syrian opposition sources, and U.S. and other foreign
governments attempt to find a means to stop the bloodletting, the Hartford
Seminary happily maintains a "partnership" with a religious institution
under the dictator's wing.
This partnership dates back to a 2005 ten-day junket to Syria led by
Hartford president Heidi Hadsell, which met with:
Dr. Hussam al-Din Farfour [alternative spelling: Hassam-Eddin Farfour],
founder of Al-Fat[i]h University in Damascus, and Dr. Maher abu al-Dahab,
dean of languages at the university. They said their university would work
to send five students a year to Hartford Seminary. The Seminary group also
met with the leaders of two state universities, in Damascus and Aleppo. ...
Ibrahim Abu-Rabi' ... said these two universities are considering sending
students to the Seminary.
Yet Hartford's relationship with Assad is deeper still. In 1991, the
seminary considered itself to have scored a "first" in appointing a Muslim
to its core faculty. The individual so honored was the late Ibrahim Abu-
Rabi (1956-2011), a Palestinian who moved to the University of Alberta, in
Edmonton, Canada, in 2009.
In 1996 Abu-Rabi authored a book, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence
in the Modern Arab World, that unabashedly praised such leading Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood figures as Hassan Al-Banna (1906-49) and Sayyid Qutb (
1906-66). According to Daniel Pipes:
[T]he author devotes half his book to the analysis of what he calls the
"grandiose exegesis" of Sayyid Qutb, the vituperative Egyptian thinker who
helped establish so many of modern fundamentalism's main features, including
its hatred of moderate Muslims and its anti-Semitism. To say that Abu-Rabi
is sympathetic to Qutb (and several other fundamentalist authors) would be
an understatement. In fact, he serves as their apostle to an English-
speaking audience.
Abu-Rabi additionally flaunted his association with Ramadan Shallah, once a
colleague at the University of South Florida of Sami Al-Arian who in 2006
pled guilty to conspiracy to assist the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
terror group. Shallah had joined Al-Arian in operating the World and Islam
Studies Enterprise (WISE), a think-tank, only to surface in Damascus in 1995
as head of PIJ. In 2006 he was added to the FBI's roster of most wanted
terrorists.
In a 2010 alumni bulletin, the University of Alberta described breathlessly
a trip organized by Abu-Rabi to Syria, with the cooperation of his "friends
-- Abdul-Fattah Al-Bizen, the Mufti (foremost [Sunni] Islamic religious
authority) of Damascus, and Sheikh Hassam-Eddin Farfour, personal religious
adviser to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad." Al-Bizen, a director of Al-
Fatih Islamic Institute, is a puppet of the Assad regime. In January 2012,
as the dictatorship was slaughtering its subjects en masse, Sheikh Farfour
spoke fulsomely of Assad, praising the tyrant's "concepts of tolerance and
forgiveness ... [which] constitute a part of the reform process and of the
decrees which serve the interests of the homeland." He then called on the
Syrian people to "cooperate and unite their ranks to restore the security
and stability to their homeland."
According to a Wikileaks cable originated by the U.S. State Department in
2008, Assad had attempted to deport new and first-year foreign students
attending Al-Fatiha and two more privately-funded Islamic academies in
Damascus. But the dictator was, according to the cable, persuaded to
rescind the order by the argument that the students would serve as "
ambassadors for Syria." In other words, it was in Assad's interest to
continue using the schools to produce propagandists and sympathizers of his
regime.
Hartford's blind flirtation with radical Islam is not limited to providing
faculty space for Abu-Rabi. Hartford's faculty also includes Ingrid Mattson
, the headscarf-sporting former president of the fundamentalist Islamic
Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA has been exposed as an arm of the
Muslim Brotherhood, acting in cooperation with Saudi Wahhabis and South
Asian jihadists. Mattson, who appeared as a Muslim participant in the 2009
inauguration of President Barack Obama, possesses a long and dismaying
biography as an apologist for Islamist extremism. In the aftermath of the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mattson was among the most prominent in purveying
the claim that jihad in Islam could be only defensive, and in portraying
Wahhabism -- which inspires al-Qaeda -- as a reform movement comparable to
Protestant Christianity. Since then she has promoted a totalistic view of
sharia law as applicable to all human transactions -- in line with Islamist
ideology.
The Hartford Seminary also evinces great pride in its Islamic chaplaincy
program, which produces Muslim clerics for service in "prison ministry,
hospital, university, military, or community work." Given the predominance
of Saudi-inspired Wahhabi imams among Muslim prison clerics in many American
correctional institutions, Hartford's Muslim chaplaincy program deserves a
long-delayed examination.
As atrocities by the Syrian regime increase, the terrorist group Hamas has
decamped from Damascus, although Palestinian Islamic Jihad reportedly
remains in place there. PIJ has no problems with the horrors perpetrated by
Assad and his cohort, and neither, it seems, has the Hartford Seminary.
Hartford's Congregationalist founders, were they alive today, might very
well say the time has come for a thorough review of the Seminary's Middle
East misadventures, as part of an old-fashioned New England housecleaning.
Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. |
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