Opposition To Political Islam
One of Baran's key areas of specialization is countering the spread of radical Turkish Islamist ideology in Europe and Eurasia. She has worked to foster the tolerant integration of Muslims into Western societies, arguing that the creation of "parallel societies" within a state's broader society will only encourage intolerance and extremism on both sides.
Baran has criticized European and American governments for working too closely with groups or individuals that she claims espouse an Islamist ideology. She argues that such engagement actually works against U.S. and European interests. Baran wrote an article for The Weekly Standard on this very subject. In it, she advocates a kind of "litmus test" for deciding who and what type of Muslim groups the U.S. government should engage with. Baran argues that "the deciding factor must be ideology: Is the group Islamist or not?"
She believes that the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, and Hizb ut-Tahrir fail her test.
Baran's Hizb ut-Tahrir: Islam's Political Insurgency, published in 2004, asserted that Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist organization, is a "conveyor belt for radicalism and terrorism." She qualified her statement by saying, "While HT as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts."
Read more about this topic: Zeyno Baran
Famous quotes containing the words opposition to, opposition, political and/or islam:
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My objection to Liberalism is this—that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind—namely, politics—of philosophical ideas instead of political principles.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“During the first formative centuries of its existence, Christianity was separated from and indeed antagonistic to the state, with which it only later became involved. From the lifetime of its founder, Islam was the state, and the identity of religion and government is indelibly stamped on the memories and awareness of the faithful from their own sacred writings, history, and experience.”
—Bernard Lewis, U.S. Middle Eastern specialist. Islam and the West, ch. 8, Oxford University Press (1993)