Happy birthday, Zuhdi Jasser!
One of the heroes of the present age, consistently slandered and misrepresented by his enemies but in fact deserving of adulation and love.
Happy birthday to my dear beloved friend Zuhdi Jasser, who for more than 20 full years now has been a soldier on the front lines of the struggle to defend the noble principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the assault on them being waged by the Muslim supremacist fascists who besmirch his honourable religion, at whom he is rightly enraged. Together with such similarly glorious figures as Raheel Raza, Salim Mansur, Tahir Aslam Gora, Raquel Evita Saraswati, Syed Raza, Tawfik Hamid, Abdirizak Bihi, Tehmina Kazi, Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, Asra Nomani, Mithal Al-Alusi, Munir Pervaiz Saami, Bassam Tibi, Tufail Ahmad, Hassen Chalghoumi, Soheib Bencheikh, Naser Khader, Noor Dahri, Ahmed Subhy Mansour, Mufti Abu Layth, Mohammad Tawhidi, Usama Hasan, Saïd Djabelkhir, Omar Qudrat, Jalal Zuberi, Ahmed Vanya, Farid Ghadry, Muhammad Al-Kabour, Zainab Zeb Khan, Amna Farooqi, Jamal Hasan, Sherkoh Abbas, Oubai Shahbandar, Zeba Khan, Qanta Ahmed, Farzana Hassan-Shahid, Hisham Kabbani, Tarek Fatah, Ahmed Aboutaleb, Tufail Ahmad, Husain Haqqani, Farahnaz Ispahani, and Hasan Mahmud, among others, he has been valiantly endeavouring to fight for the deeply humane vision of Islam of which Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alaihi wasalaam, and Allah Himself, subhana wa ta’ala, would truly approve – an Islam of love and mercy and interfaith amity, an Islam of sura 4 ayah 135 and sura 2 ayah 256 and sura 5 ayah 32 and not these bullshit shaytaani interpretations that the khawariji assholes like Daesh, Al-Qaeda, and the Ikhwan are using to fuck things up for everyone.
Dr. Jasser is a uniquely and extraordinarily brave man – when almost the entire Muslim community was dead-set against the idea that the American Congress should investigate the ways in which the Qur’án and Sunnah are being used to inspire violence and supremacism and cruelty to non-Muslims, he was one of the only Muslim voices who spoke out to say, “Yes, this is a good idea, the American public at large needs to be aware of exactly how this works and why so that we can formulate strategies to oppose it, and to do that work is a variety of human rights activism, not a species of bigotry.” He and his friends have always been unafraid to build bridges with Israelis and Zionists, as well as with other communities whom Muslim fascists generally hate, such as Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Ahmadi and Nizari Ismaili Muslims, and my own religious community, the Bahá’ís. They deserve credit for their consistent magnanimity and kindness in these ways.
I don’t agree with him on everything (he’s a much bigger fan of capitalism and laissez-faire economics than I am, for example), and in fact the small coterie of humane liberal Muslim activists of which he is a leading member sometimes disagrees among its membership! That’s normal and healthy! But it’s always worth it to me – several times a year, every year – to make clear how grateful I am to him and to all of them for the extraordinary work they do in defence of universal human rights against the monstrous evil of Islamic supremacism and the global jihad ideology. If we had many millions like him, we would all be considerably better off, and the outcome of the present conflict would likely be a victory for the forces of human dignity and humane civilization. The many mendacious commentators who routinely slander him and subject him to vicious attacks have always been entirely wrong. He deserves our support, our respect, our affection, and our love.