New clarification by Imam Zaid

Imam Zaid has written a new clarification regarding Hamza Yusuf's participation at the Tony Blair Foundation event. The original posting on this site has been modified to include the new statement.

For now, I will keep the original statement by Imam Zaid as a matter of record.

HOWEVER, I do think this is somewhat of a novel situation - because of the kind of erroneous charge that were made against an individual - and, after consulting some others, I may decide to either only have excerpts of the original statement available, remove it altogether, or come up with some other alternative.

There were hundreds, and thousands who came just to this site searching for "tony blair hamza yusuf" (at least two or three days *before* the event took place - and I think there were a couple of other sites that had the info. up several days before I did) - with hundreds from the San Francisco Bay Area, where main offices of Zaytuna is located.

The only comments (that I stopped publishing) people were leaving on this site (before Imam Zaid's initial statement) were in defense of Hamza Yusuf attending the event. I do hope that they they now recognize, just how serious of a problem it is for for an Islamic scholar to share a panel with a war criminal.

See also Traditional Islamism's blog entry on this issue.