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American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is an American Muslim think tank formed in 2003 by Zuhdi Jasser in Phoenix, Arizona.
AIFD advocates for the separation of religion and state and confronts the ideologies of political Islam and openly counters the belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic state. [1] [2]
AIFD's mission statement as found on their website states, "is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state." [3]
AIFD was founded by Zuhdi Jasser in March 2003. A former Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy, Jasser served 11 years as a medical officer. His tours of duty included Medical Department Head aboard the USS El Paso which deployed to Somalia during Operation Restore Hope; Chief Resident at Bethesda Naval Hospital; and Staff Internist for the Office of the Attending Physician to the United States Congress. He is a recipient of the Meritorious Service Medal.
Timothy R. Furnish said that Jasser's quest is to resurrect the doctrine of the Mu'tazilah, a group in early Islamic history which stated that reason was as important as revelation, and that the Qur'an was created rather than eternally existent and that humans had free will. [4]
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Through civil rights actions, media relations, civic engagement, and education, CAIR's stated purpose is to promote social, legal and political activism among Muslims in America.
Islamophobia is the irrational fear of, hatred of, or prejudice against the religion of Islam or Muslims in general, especially when perceived by outsiders as a geopolitical force or a source of terrorism.
Daniel Pipes is an American commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.
Islam is the third largest religion in the United States (1%), behind Christianity (63%) and Judaism (2%), and equaling the shares of Buddhism and Hinduism. A 2017 study estimated that 1.1% of the population of the United States are Muslim. In 2017, twenty states, mostly in the South and Midwest, reported Islam to be the largest non-Christian religion. In 2020, the U.S. Religion Census found there to be 4.45 million Muslim Americans, or roughly 1.3% of the population.
Asra Quratulain Nomani is an Indian American journalist and author. Born in India to Muslim parents, she earned a BA from West Virginia University in liberal arts in 1986 and an MA from the American University in international communications in 1990. She subsequently worked as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal with her colleague Daniel Pearl in Pakistan post-9/11. Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by Islamist terrorists while following an investigative lead. Nomani later became the co-director of the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigative-reporting project which has looked into Pearl's murder.
The Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) is a U.S.-based Islamic think tank challenging Islamist interpretations of Islam. It was founded in 2004 by eight people including the Sufi Muslim author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz and officially opened on March 25, 2005. With its headquarters in Washington, D.C., today it has subsidiaries in London and Cologne, Germany and correspondents in 32 countries of the world.
Muslim supporters of Israel refers to both Muslims and cultural Muslims who support the right to self-determination of the Jewish people and the likewise existence of a Jewish homeland in the Southern Levant, traditionally known as the Land of Israel and corresponding to the modern polity known as the State of Israel. Muslim supporters of the Israeli state are widely considered to be a rare phenomenon in light of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the larger Arab–Israeli conflict. Within the Muslim world, the legitimacy of the State of Israel has been challenged since its inception, and support for Israel's right to exist is a minority orientation. Pro-Israel Muslims have faced opposition from both moderate Muslims and Islamists.
Secularism—that is, the separation of religion from civic affairs and the state—has been a controversial concept in Islamic political thought, owing in part to historical factors and in part to the ambiguity of the concept itself. In the Muslim world, the notion has acquired strong negative connotations due to its association with removal of Islamic influences from the legal and political spheres under foreign colonial domination, as well as attempts to restrict public religious expression by some secularist nation states. Thus, secularism has often been perceived as a foreign ideology imposed by invaders and perpetuated by post-colonial ruling elites, and is frequently understood to be equivalent to irreligion or anti-religion.
The Clarion Project is an American nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that was founded in 2006. The organization has been involved in the production and distribution of the films Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America, Iranium, and Honor Diaries. These films have been criticized by some for allegedly falsifying information and described as anti-Muslim propaganda. The organization publishes a weekly "Extremism Roundup" newsletter.
Several honor killings have been documented in the United States. As of 2012, there is no central agency that collects data across all jurisdictions in regards to honor violence in the United States. There is reluctance among some organizations to label events as honor killings to avoid stigmatizing Muslim and Arab cultures.
The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America is a 2008 documentary style film directed by Wayne Kopping of South Africa and Erik Werth. It was produced by Werth and Raphael Shore, a Canadian-Israeli, with financing from the Clarion Project, an organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim group.
Zuhdi Jasser, also known as M. Zuhdi Jasser, and Mohamed Zuhdi Jasser is an American religious and political commentator and medical doctor specializing in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology in Phoenix, Arizona. Jasser is a former lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, where he served as staff internist in the Office of the Attending Physician of the United States Congress. In 2003, with a group of American Muslims, Jasser founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) based in Phoenix, Arizona, and in 2004 he was one of the founders of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
Qanta A. Ahmed is a British-American physician who came to prominence as a doctor specializing in sleep disorders. She has also worked as an author, women's rights activist, journalist and public commentator.
Islamic extremism in the United States comprises all forms of Islamic extremism occurring within the United States. Islamic extremism is an adherence to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, potentially including the promotion of violence to achieve political goals. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Islamic extremism became a prioritized national security concern of the U.S. government and a focus of many subsidiary security and law enforcement entities. Initially, the focus of concern was on foreign Islamic terrorist organizations, particularly al-Qaeda, but in the course of the years since the September 11 terror attacks, the focus has shifted more towards Islamic extremist and jihadist networks within the United States.
Gatestone Institute is an American conservative think tank based in New York City, known for publishing articles pertaining to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, specifically with regard to Islamic extremism. It was founded in 2012 by Nina Rosenwald, who serves as its president. John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor, was its chairman from 2013 until March 2018. Its current chairman is Amir Taheri. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.
The Million Muslim March was a massive protest march in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2013, attended by several dozen non-Muslim 9/11 conspiracy theorists. It was organized by the American Muslim Political Action Committee (AMPAC) which supports the conspiracy theory.
Nina Rosenwald is an American political activist and philanthropist. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald is vice president of the William Rosenwald Family Fund and co-chair of the board of American Securities Management. She is the founder and president of Gatestone Institute, a New York-based right-wing anti-Muslim think tank.
The Muslim Reform Movement is a U.S.-based organization dedicated to reform in Islam based on values of peace, human rights, and secular governance.
This is a list of individual liberal and progressive Islamic movements in North America, sorted by country.
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