Well, for starters, in the areas where Muslims practice female circumcision, such as Egypt, Christians also practice female circumcision.
Similarly, in the tribal parts of the Middle East, where Muslims engage in honor killings, members of other religions do as well.
For example, in Iraq, the Yezdis also match their Kurdish counterparts when it comes to honor killings.
For that matter, when I mention Kurds, it’s not because the Kurds are more “evil” or “misogynist” than other Iraqis, but that they tend to be more “tribal”(for lack of a better word) than other Iraqis.
Ok, so the region and its culture is particularly misogynistic. How exactly does that excuse a religion that originates in that region and has been the dominant cultural force for over a millenia?
I suspect that you are taking a few anecdotes, extrapolating them to large populations out of context, and then drawing conclusions that are not supported by the evidence.
Note that even you have to add the modifier “in many nations” when discussing the ways in which you believe Islam is failing to “evolve/reform.” Those “many nations” are the same nations (or close neighbors to the other nations) where other religions are also failing to reform. As you have already suggested, (inadvertently supporting my assertion), the regions in India where women are treated poorly tend to be removed from the locations where the economy has moved into the 21st century. As Ibn Warraq has pointed out, in the locations where women are subjected to poor treatment, the Christian or Animist societies treat women in the very same way.
One of the reasons why Thailand has become a magnet for the sex trade has been the way in which the particular Buddhist society, there, treats women and men differently, often giving women no options beyond prostitution, (including rampant sale of pre-pubescent girls as sex slaves). Men can be ordained monks for a limited time as a way to bring holiness to the family. Women, (even nuns) do not share that same opportunity and are supposed to do their part by supporting their parents, but in a collapsing agrarian economy (as agri-business pushes out small farmers) the women are forced into industry and, when that outlet is glutted, into prostitution. At the same time, the impoverished small farmers have found a “market” for some of their daughters. Yet this is not portrayed as a problem of Buddhism, even though it is rooted in Buddhist beliefs, because people are willing to recognize that one nation’s cultural practices are not relevant to every adherent of that religion.
We find the same trend of people adapting religion to culture occurring among Muslims in Europe, with most Muslim immigrants adopting the European attitudes toward sexual roles and secular approaches to religion. There are always the few throwbacks that prompt news stories and raise eyebrows with their desperate attempts to re-create the patriarchies of the old country, but the vast majority of Muslims in Europe have adopted attitudes toward religion and women that very closely parallel their secular and Christian neighbors.
Now, I would tend to agree with a claim that Islam, in general, does not yet appear to have undergone the sort of re-orientation toward secular values that occurred in Christianity through the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. But that is simply a matter of historic trends. The sort of revolution in overall society that was rooted in the printing press, the beginning of widespread literacy. the corruption of the Renaissance, (not Medieval), popes, and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire has not yet occurred in Islam. I would guess that the spread of technology, the movement of peoples based on economic opportunity, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is very likely creating a situation that parallels, in some ways, sixteenth century Europe and will very probably result in a similar development in Islamic thought. It will not be a direct event-for-event repetition of Christianity’s history. There is no monolithic RCC against which “reforms” can be launched; there is no single, fairly cohesive culture in which it can occur, (as happened in Europe), there are a great deal more outside influences than Europe faced. Still, it would appear that the process is under way.
I do not claim that it is divorced. Religion will certainly shape many of the expressions of culture. I simply note that religion does not appear to impose attitudes on people that go against a given culture. It is more often used to reinforce culture. Muslims in lands where the 19th century is only now beginning to nudge its way into society still have attitudes that Europe (slowly) shed after the Enlightenment. Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians demonstrate the same behaviors in the same regions.
Had the OP been a rant against Islam in the M.E.N.A., I would probably not have paid much attention to this thread. By using the behaviors of one limited set of people to condemn millions of separate people who would never engage in those practices, the OP caught my attention. This is the Straight Dope and promoting ignorance or error is not supposed to be our task.
Agreed, but would you in turn not agree that the culture that Islam was born to reinforce was a different one, and the reinforcement it provides today is deleterious? And the (admittedly inflammatory) issue that Beecher has picked for this thread is merely one example of such reinforcement? Maybe not an important example, maybe not an uncontested one, but certainly one such?
You are doing it again, pretending that you are defending people, instead of knee-jerking against criticism of ideas sacred to people. No one is “condemning millions of separate people”.
Would anyone here argue against a claim that the traditional and mainstream Christian view is that homosexuality is a sin, and that this has led to a hard time for many gay people? Neither the fact that every Christian fails to lynch their gay neighbors, nor the existence of liberal reinterpretations of scripture, nor anecdotes about the acceptance of gay marriage would be evidence against this proposition.
Why then all the apology and denial when it comes to Islam?
If you mean, “Do I think that Salafist or Wahhabist Islam are variants of Islam that I would be quite happy to see die out?” Sure.
However trying to claim that the way something originated 1400 years ago provides a clear indication that it can only be “bad” today is illogical and pointless.
For example, much is made of the claim that Islam was spread by warfare, (problematic in its own right, but we’ll let that pass), with the attendant claims that Islam is ruthless and intolerant and wants to conquer the world, today. However, when we study history, we discover that neither of the Muslim conquests of Jerusalem were as bloody as the conquest by the Christians, that the Muslim conquest of Constantinople was not as savage as the conquest of that city by their Christian “allies,” and that the tolerant promotion of study and learning by people of many belief systems for two centuries in Muslim Cordoba was unrivaled by any Christian center of learning for around 1800 years.
Given the way in which Muslims have (when they have been permitted) integrated into the surrounding cultures to which they move, blaming “Islam” for the excesses of any particular culture is simplistic and claiming that “Islam” is going to export those behaviors to other places is just dumb.
I will note one exception to that last statement. When “Christian” Europe colonized the world, a great many cultures, including Muslim cultures were suppressed. The dissolution of many of those imperial holdings occurred in the context of a conflict between Marxism and the West. With the failure of Marxism, a number people in former colonies, still seeing the West as imperial and looking for an alternative path have turned to Islam as a way to build their identity. Just as many freedom fighters were lured into the Soviet sphere of influence throughout the twentieth century, Salafist or Wahhabist Muslims have made it a point to try to export their brand of Islam to those struggling societies. This is a legitimate concern. However, the appropriate response is not to condemn all of Islam–thus driving all Muslims into the arms of the Islamists–but to condemn only those advocates of Islamist Fundamentalism who are corrupting the lands to which they are exporting their particular brand.
You are dodging the OP, still. In fact, you have not made any factual additions whatsoever that are relevant. It stands that criticism of Mo’s behavior is taboo in Islam, and the behavior in question is part of his bio. The last sentence of the OP does not have to apply to every last Muslim, certainly, for the title of the thread to be true.
So, let’s try this again, which of these statements do you take issue with, and what is your evidence?
It is, however, the point that you are so desperate to make.
Lots of beliefs are held with certain levels of cognitive dissonance. Lots of beliefs are ignored. You so need this one specific event to be a “rape” that you are perfectly willing to be inconsistent in your own arguments to insist upon it.
You believe that “Muslims” hold this story (that you do not necessarily believe) to be true.
You ignore evidence from the same Hadith that contradicts the claim of that one event.
You put up assertions that (in your sole opinion) the contradictory evidence is not contradictory. (I would guess that the majority of Muslims who even bother to consider her age do note the discrepancies that you try to deny.)
You ignore the fact that the Qur’an prohibits sexual relations before menarche.
You keep referring to this anecdote as part of a “bio” when it is not actually included in the various Sīra that are considered actual biographies, most of which were written before the Hadith.
You then tie it all up in a claim that Muslims have to accept your version of the story of what you call rape.
My guess would be that few Muslims (aside from a few loons) ever pay any attention to the story. Certainly, none of the Muslims posting to this board have ever made it a point of belief.
How about Deobandi Islam? And how about the fact that these are not minor variants, but influential ones, and especially in the case of Wahhabism, very well funded to boot? In other words, I’m nowhere near as sanguine as you about the religious reformations. You seem to see them as some sort of certainty just because it has happened with some other religions. Are there equally influential voices calling for reform in Islam? Who are they?
If you insist on tilting at strawmen, you aren’t going to get much of a debate from me.
Huh. There’s a whole subcontinent full of problems that doesn’t quite agree with your view on how peacefully Islam and Muslims have always integrated with the native population.
This “appropriate” response that you’re looking for, it smacks of appeasement. Let’s not criticise them for fear that we will drive them to become bad people and do bad things. Maybe the criticism Beecher has brought is not the right sort, and Islam definitely is not the only religion in the world that needs the right sort of criticism, but it definitely needs more and gets less than any other. I think it’s because reasonable people like you don’t do the right sort of criticising that things like this come up more often than they should.
I am not ignoring anything. What is being ignored, by you, is that the collectors of the hadith did not consider whatever inconsistencies you are pointing to as enough to discredit the multiple positive claims of her age in her own voice. If all of these various claims can be called into question by inconsistencies, then any hadith or collection is up for reinterpretation or rejection. Which would be some kind of reform Islam or something, which is not even happening, or barely happening, to be generous. Get back to me when these claims are emanating from Cairo, Medina, and Karachi instead of Calgary and the State Universities of California.
No, I did not. This thread is full of these unfounded assertions by you.
Your guess doesn’t mean anything.
What in the hell are you talking about? Some people assert this, it is the mainstream interpretation today, thank Allah. (see how easy it is to ascertain and accept basic facts) But it is irrelevant to this discussion unless you were to try to use it to argue against point number 1.
The evidence for this has been presented and repeatedly ignored, by you.
I consider sex between a nine year old and an adult to necessarily be rape, yes. If you want to make a claim that prominent Muslims are free to criticize this behavior of their prophet, let’s see some evidence.
Your guesses, which BTW are similar to what my guesses were, when all I had were guesses, have proven to be worthless.
I responded to the vague things you have posted rather than whatever you might have been thinking to yourself.
You do not appear to be aware that Muslims entered India as part of a political effort of conquest. In addition, many of the current conflicts can be traced to more political maneuvering in the period just prior to and subsequent to independence. When Great Britain “united” India under the Raj, they followed the well-trod path of joining disparate peoples in smaller states into single entities that came into conflict once the British troops were withdrawn. The conflict was political, with religion the marker for whom to hate.
In contrast, Southeast Asia, which Islam entered by way of missionaries, has not seen the same sort of ongoing conflicts between differing peoples while it has seen the shedding of cultural aspects from M.E.N.A. and the absorption of cultural traits from that part of Asia and Oceania.
Similarly, as Muslims have immigrated to Europe and North America, the vast majority of them have taken on the cultural views of the secular peoples or Christians who were already there. (The largest Muslim-Christian conflict in Europe since the (political) last siege of Vienna, was the attempt by Christian Serbs to destroy the Muslim community.)
:rolleyes:
What was it you were saying about straw men? You are certainly not addressing anything I have said.
I have no problem with people criticizing Salafism. I have no problem with people opposing al Qaida. I do have a problem with people seizing on (or inventing) issues that are specific to local cultures and making grand condemnations of Islam.
As to Islam getting less criticism than other beliefs, you cannot be serious. Daniel Pipes, Bruce Bawer, Robert Spencer, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Pamela Gellar, Mark Steyn, Niall Ferguson, Orianna Falacci, Christopher Caldwell, Geert Wilders, Bat Ye’or, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin :rolleyes:, and even Bernard Lewis, (who should really know better), are all out there promoting Islamaphobia and criticizing Islam, generally using either ignorance or lies.
No, you responded to things you made up for me, rather than things I posted. Always easier that way, what?
Once again, your strange desire to separate and hold religion apart from all the things done in its name does you no credit. Even if the only thing religion does is act as a marker for who to hate, that’s quite bad enough don’t you think? And there are significant factions within Islam, as you yourself acknowledge, that do a lot more than just act as a marker.
So…the further Islam gets from its roots the more palatable it is? Again you have not addressed the aspect that if Islam originates within the culture of the Middle East and remains the dominant force there for over a 1000 years, it is every bit as culpable as that culture itself. If you don’t agree, then you should define what you think a religion is. Turkey’s secular because they lucked out with Ataturk. Indonesia is alright because none of the original bearers of the religion actually made it there in any numbers. And even there 30% of Muslims want apostates executed.
Only my first sentence there was directly addressing your statements, which DO smack of appeasement. No straw man there. I quote
If all Islam is sitting by and letting this happen, (I’m waiting for you to point out equally influential strains that decry Wahhabi and Deobandi Islam), then I fail to understand why they do not also deserve condemnation.
Are you saying there are no problems, none whatsoever, that you have with the Islamic religion’s core beliefs? My basic problem with it is that it is a religion, but there are many other things I find distasteful, including how much political and day-to-day power it commands in most of the places where it is the dominant force.
See, there you go. The only names I recognise (Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Niall Ferguson, Geert Wilders, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin) are mostly a bunch of crazy people. It’s because religion in general, and Islam in particular gets too much of a free pass. And you bet it gets less criticism than other beliefs. Do you think it faces anywhere near the degree and volume of criticism that Christianity, for instance, gets?
I’m sorry but the idea that Islam maintains a huge amount of “political and day-to-day power” in most Muslim states is absurd.
There are something like 65 countries in the world that are predominantly Muslim and only about three or four could be called theocracies. Off the top of my head the only ones I can think of are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan(though that’s questionable).
The idea that theocracies are common in the Islamic world is a myth.
Now, are there others where there is some government recognition of Islam. Yes, but it’s mostly symbolic and no different from the way church and state are entwined in most European countries and Israel.
Ok, so for starters you’re confessing to not recognizing arguably the world’s most acknowledged expert on the Ottoman Empire and Islam, Bernard Lewis.
Beyond that, claiming “I don’t recognize those people” is hardly a compelling argument when insisting that Islam doesn’t receive the criticism it does.
If anything, your comments on the supposed amount of political power Islam has in most countries would seem to indicate that many westerners have a heavily distorted view of the Islamic world.
Well no, in the West Christianity is dominant so obviously most western critics are going to condemn it more.
That said, I’d argue that we hear vastly more about the treatment of women in the Middle East than we do in sub-Saharran Africa, where they’re treated vastly worse or the way women in India or China are treated where due to sexism and abortion for the purposes of sex selection men outnumber women in both countries and in Indian men have a higher life expectancy than Indian women.
Those strike me as more of an apples to apples comparison(how the west views other non-western cultures) than comparing the views of Christianity vs. Islam.
Not really. That a bunch of atheist Marxists in Northern Ireland were able to use “Catholicism” as an identity badge for several decades does not really reflect on Catholicism any more than a bunch of haters following Ian Paisley reflect on Presbyterianism.
So? I have never claimed that there have never been religious wars. You were claiming that that the violence in India was a direct result of Islam. I was pointing out that most of the “sectarian” violence in India was political, not religious.
I would say that is a possibility. Islam certainly only added more to the cultures in which it was seeded than it did to the culture in which it was first planted. (Pretty much the way that Christianity and Judaism developed the further they got from Judea.)
Religion is an aspect of culture, but I doubt that it has any power to make radical changes to a culture except over great periods of time. Gibbons notwithstanding, Christianity did nothing to turn the Roman Empire into a mass of peace loving anti-war demonstrators. It did provide the seeds for what would eventually become secularism after a period longer than Islam has been extant.
That is an absurd definition of appeasement. Suggesting that one criticize bad behavior while refraining from insulting a person who is not behaving badly becomes “appeasement” in your odd world view.
I do not follow Islam’s core beliefs, but I do not condemn them. I suspect that “core” beliefs to which you object are either distortions of the actual beliefs or are simply things to which you like to object.
You really claim that Islam receives less criticism than Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart or the various Prosperity Gospel churches? These are people who have gotten by with nothing but tepid disagreement for years–and that criticism is nearly always from outside the Christian community. That seems like an interesting double standard. You can criticize Muslims for not being critical “enough” of other Muslims while ignoring the fact that Christians are silent regarding their own evil groups.
The reality is that people recognize that they do better to criticize “their own” and most religious groups, (heck, most human groups), consider people from different sects to be from another planet. In the good old days, you could find all sorts of Christians bashing each other. (You can still find folks like the Moody Bible Institute engaged in that behavior.) They are routinely looked upon as being quaint throwbacks to a less civil age.
That you have not heard of the other critics of Islam probably indicates only that you do not pay attention to them. When you hear “Islam=Bad” do you simply move on saying “I already knew that”? If you are unaware of Pipes and Lewis or Ferguson and Gellar, then you have clearly never paid attention to the actual discussions of Islam in the Western world. (And Gingrich and Santorum are jerks, but they are hardly fringe people outside the major political movements of the U.S.)
You just did it again. In the same post as you deny it.
Like I said. If you think you can hold religion as being something above and beyond all of what is done in its name, you need to define it better. Or at least define it for me so that I can understand what you mean by the word.
And we’re both concerned that the roots are seeking to make the modified versions more like the original.
Far from being a power to drive change, IMO religions, particularly religions with an insistence on ‘the book’, act as a resistance to positive change. Muhammed is the last prophet and his words and life are the sole arbiter of the “truth” according to Islam. This is well and good when you’re trying to unite tribes and don’t want break away factions. It is less good when 1400 years on, you need your societies to modernise and leave behind much of what he said and did.
Where have I asked that you insult anyone, pray? There are large and influential voices within Islam that are extremely fundamentalist(not radical, mind). These are not all of Islam, but there simply isn’t a comparable counter movement, even though Wahhabism has been around a fair while.
Are these instances comparable to the Salafi and Deobandi schools of thought in influence? Are there any signs that they could be as influential?
If I identified myself as a “democratist” or “capitalist” I would. I do identify myself as an atheist. I’ll be happy to criticise atheists and atheist movements who’re twisting atheist beliefs to justify behaviour that I consider immoral. Point them out. If a very large section of Muslims do not feel the same way about Wahhabis and Deobandis, I do indeed feel they are due some criticism. I don’t know why you think this is tantamount to insulting them. Not doing so in the fear that it will “drive all Muslims into the arms of Islamists” is the very definition of appeasement.
I condemn the core beliefs of most religions. They’re outdated and the only use they have is as history, so we can try and learn from our mistakes. As a core belief, just the idea of prayer five times a day is repugnant enough for me. How about segregation of women in mosques?
I’m far from defending Christianity, but it has HAD its reform, and of late has come under intense, vituperative, and very popular, criticism from atheist groups, all of whom are ex christian, in as much as they were born like that. When (ex?) Muslims on the other hand, write something critical of Islam, they are hounded out of their countries and live under constant fear of their lives. Do you think that could perhaps be tamping down the criticism a notch? I certainly do. And I think Muslims who allow this without changing it deserve criticism. Mind, I’m not suggesting this kind of thing is unique to Islam. Only far more prevalent.
IMO, the reality is reasonable people like you think it is better not to criticise these “other” groups. You abdicate that space, loonies like the ones you’ve listed don’t, and proceed to make a hash of it.
I don’t live in the west, so I only consume the mainstream sources of news. NYT etc. These tend to be sparse. Anyway, what do you believe are reasoned criticisms of Islam? Do you believe any exist?
A country doesn’t have to be a theocracy for Islam to command a great deal of political and day to day power within it. Are you denying that Islam seeks far greater control of a nation state than most other religions? Or that governance in countries where Muslims are the majority is not driven more by religion than other countries? Fuck that, Muslims are only 14 percent of the population in India and Sharia law applies to them. What other major religion has a legal system? Which other major religion has a SINGLE theocracy, let alone three or four you can name off the top of your head?