A reformed Islam could save Afghanistan - Yahoo! News - 0 views
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What the country needs is an interpretation of Islam that embraces freedom and human rights instead of violence and tribal oppression. Everything else is a Band-Aid.
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All forms of censorship within "self" and "society" have to be removed because they are obstacles on the path to realization. This means that no individual or group can legitimately dominate another, and that challenging all forms of domination in oneself and others is an ethical responsibility. This Islam is a religion of freedom.
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the enormity of the task should not prevent Afghans from undertaking it, as it is impossible to imagine a democratic and developing Afghanistan if the status of women is not confronted. It requires a frontal jihad – a political, intellectual, and spiritual struggle to liberate Muslims and Islamic societies from the addiction to force. This can only be successful when grounded in a freedom-oriented Islam, rather than Western models that seem increasingly alien to many Afghans.
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The renaissance of Islam is above all the task of young Afghan people, who make up nearly 70 percent of the country's population. Such a renaissance is not historically alien to Afghan culture: Avicena's rationalism and Rumi's mystic philosophy are, after all, part of this tradition, much more so than the practice of suicide bombing.
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the relative freedom of the media in Afghanistan
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Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was the first elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution. He has lived in exile outside Paris since 1981, when he fell out with his former ally Ayatollah Khomeini. In exile, he has continued to develop his idea of Islam as a "discourse of freedom."