News that the Islamic Society of North America’s gaggle of “Islamic scholars” has deemed airport body-scanners as inappropriate for Muslims is rightfully vilified by anti-Islamists and anyone else who cares about security and common sense. As a Muslim, I find the so-called “Fiqh Council” ruling more of the same BS these fools have been spouting for 1,400 years in an effort to shape the world according to their own outdated mores.

A body scan for security purposes has nothing to do with modesty or a lack thereof, which is allegedly what these people are worried about. It’s not as if TSA folks are manning these body-scanner monitors for cheap thrills – they’re looking for bombs and guns, for goodness sakes. I would love to say that the ruling about body scanners being immodest is quite possibly the stupidest ruling such a group has ever come to, but that would be, unfortunately, untrue. Research would show that their stupidity knows few bounds, if any.

Islamic jurisprudence is pathetically out of date with the modern world, and sadly, it is blasphemously out-of-step with what Islam actually should be. It has been since the earliest days of the religion. As a Muslim who believes strongly that the religion, as it was revealed, is progressive, rights-oriented, and open-minded, it’s frustrating to see how badly it’s been hijacked by closed-minded, misogynistic, xenophobic, cultural throwbacks, and that these same people are trying to continue their work to this day.

It’s CONTEXT, people! When the Qur’an was revealed it was a RADICAL shift toward women’s rights, charitable treatment of society’s most vulnerable, merciful treatment of enemies, and fair treatment of one’s fellow mankind. But this progressive message was stamped down during Islam’s earliest days, and it hasn’t emerged from that darkness since then. The lesson of Islam to us today is to be RADICAL in our notions of what rights people should have, about how we should treat the poor and disenfranchized, and how we should treat with those who call themselves our enemies.

I choose THAT type of radical Islam – the kind that tells the so-called “Islamic scholars” to go fuck themselves. The kind that I can figure out on my own by reading the Qur’an in its proper context. The kind that leads me to believe that the U.S. is the best country in which to be a practicing Muslim, because freedom works and repression doesn’t.

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