Australian Islamist Monitor

“People Like Us confronts the themes that define this chasm head-on: women, jihad, secularism, terrorism, Reformation and modernity. Its piercing examination of these subjects reveals our thoughtless and destructive tendency to assume that the world's problems could be solved if only everyone became more like us. The result is deep mutual ignorance and animosity, reinforced by both Muslim and Western commentators. In this book, he draws on his knowledge of Western and Islamic intellectual traditions to present an analysis that is surprising and challenging, but always enlightening.” (source)

• lecturer in politics at Monash University, Global Terrorism Research Centre.

• commercial lawyer, with experience in human rights and family law.

• board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria.

• media commentator in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

• White Ribbon Day Ambassador for the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
  

“Friday's ruling concerned more than mere disagreement between religious groups. It even went beyond the contemptuous mocking of another religious group….. One defendant argued that Muslims have a plan to take over Western democracy through violence and terror, and to replace it with repressive regimes; another argued that Muslims would rape, torture and kill Christians in Australia.
Of course, people have the right to advance such ridiculous arguments…All the legislation requires is that such arguments are put reasonably and in good faith. It does not limit the scope of debate. But there was nothing reasonable about the arguments put forth…Not a scrap of proof was given for such rancid claims.
This was not a serious discussion of religious beliefs. It was nothing more than pure hate speech… Is this really necessary for our democracy? Does it really enhance our public debate? Surely not.
If anything, the idea that such statements cannot be made of religious groups is actually consistent with the traditional Australian approach to free speech….. By all means, let us engage in passionate, robust debate. But let us do so reasonably and sincerely so that our speech can create a well-informed society that is so vital to democracy. If instead we allow misleading, hate-inducing vilification to masquerade as debate, we are actually undermining the very democracy that is so dear to all of us. (source)

From an article in Al Age about his book.
“Wahhabist ideas can be encountered in Muslim communities around the world, including Australia, and Aly warns that many Western commentators have routinely failed to understand them and  that what Islam needs is not a reformation but a renaissance — a renaissance of its classical traditions. "When people say that, for example, the Taliban in Afghanistan were a medieval government, my response is to say, 'If only they were!' If you look at classical Islamic civilisation in, say, Moorish Spain, you get a picture of Islam that is very different from the one you get watching CNN today."

 

Muslim Medieaval Tolerance in Afghanistan: Referred to as Gandhara and Vahlika in ancient Hindu-Buddhist scriptures, Hinduism (Saivite) and Buddhism (Mahayana) were the dominant faiths of the ancestors of present day Pathans inhabiting the Eastern and Southern parts of Afghanistan, before the advent of Islam. Around 654 C.E., Arab forces started attacking the Hindu Kingdoms of Kabul and Zabul ruled by the Shahiya kings. The Pathans resisted for 2 centuries before they were overwhelmed and forcibly converted to Islam. So great was the massacre of Hindus that the local mountain range was renamed as 'Hindu Kush' meaning 'Hindu slaughter'. With the fall of the communist regime in 1980's and after demolition of the Babri Masjid in India on December 6, 1992, the 75000 Hindu minority, mainly resident in Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandhar, was targeted selectively and their religious sites were descecrated. They fled en-masse to cities like Delhi in India, where they are settled now. Several modern day Indian Hindu communities like the Sehgals are descendent of Afghan Hindus who fled Islamic persecution in Afghanistan several centuries ago.

Aly studied law at Melbourne University, where he was president of the Muslim Students Association, and he describes his attitudes at the time as fundamentalist.
For Aly, running into complexity meant encountering other Muslims who were clearly not inauthentic in their faith, and not stupid or insincere, either. Fundamentalism could not make sense of these other ways of being Muslim, but he found that by reconnecting with the classical tradition he could.
I fell in love with classical Islamic jurisprudence. At the end of the day these were people engaged with texts, trying to derive a meaning from them."

People Like Us … reflect his strong conviction that the public conversation in Australia is deeply impoverished.
"It's impoverished because it's oriented to self-validation," so that people say and respond to and believe things that tend to exonerate themselves."
That is reflected in the instinct of some media commentators to brand as evil anyone who suggests that terrorism is not simply a product of an ideological movement in the Muslim world that is thoroughly, absolutely evil.
"But it's not just about terrorism that this happens. Watch tabloid television: so much of it is geared towards making you feel better towards yourself and your society, as opposed to 'them'. (source)

 “The day HAMAS won the Palestinian democratic elections, the world's leading democracies failed the acid test of democracy. Rather than recognise the legitimacy of HAMAS as a freely elected representative of the Palestinian people, the US and EU threatened the Palestinian people with collective punishment for exercising their inalienable right.

Come spend your morning with our esteemed guest, Dr. Azzam Tamimi, as he exposes the hypocrisy of the "democratic west" and unravels the web of misconceptions and fallacies about HAMAS.

 Charismatic and eloquent, his passion almost always leaves his listeners completely enthralled. Having personally experienced the plight of the Palestinians, his commitment to this cause is unquestionable, often forthrightly calling for the dismantling of Zionism just as Apartheid was. “ (source )