The imams say

And there’s the statement of the Australian National Council of Imams.

The Australian National Imams Council is a body that represents the Muslim Imams of Australia and through them the community of Muslims in Australia. Currently there are 94 Imams in the Council and they are drawn from all the States and Territories of Australia. We are responsible for a variety of matters including the Appointment of the Mufti of Australia and the issuance of legal rulings for the benefit of Muslim Australians.

Oh yes? But we always hear that Islam is not like religions that have official centralized clergy who can speak as authorities – so in what sense is the ANIC ‘responsible for’ the issuance of legal rulings? How do all these legal rulings work when crowds and flocks of people issue them while no one has any actual authority to issue them? They seem to be binding yet not authoritative. How does that work? And why does anyone put up with it?

Notice also the announcement that ‘through’ the imams of Australia the ANIC ‘represents’ the community of Muslims in Australia. But it doesn’t. People can’t ‘represent’ people in that way. We don’t get to represent other people just by saying we do. The other people have to agree. Not just fail to object; actually agree. Otherwise this boast of representation is just hot air. I might as well claim I represent all American kuffars. I could make the claim, but that wouldn’t make it true.

Then the statement gets on to the bullying.

[W]e would like to place on the record our deep concern with regards to a course taught at the University under the course name ‘Women in Arabic and Islamic Literature’. The course structure and content has involved repeated and unjustified attacks upon Islam by the lecturer and a course reader that is seriously flawed. The reader promotes a very negative view of Islam and especially women in Islam. It does not represent normative, traditional Islam as practised by the overwhelming majority of the Muslim Population in the world today and through fourteen centuries of Islamic history…We would appreciate a reassessment of this course, its content and the manner in which it is taught so that it more accurately reflects the actual and not imagined teachings of Islam. And to truly reflect the normative teachings of Islam which is best placed under the Centre of excellence in Islamic studies.

No doubt you would. But the content of the course is the business of the University of Western Sydney and Dr Habib. So piss off.

I hope that is more or less what the UWS tells them.

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