At a casual glance, religions like Christianity or Buddhism seem to offer compassionate moral guidance (“love your enemies”, “avoid harming living things”) that might seem compatible, or at least not entirely at odds with, modern secular humanist morals. It seems like the admittedly vague of idea of “love” is entrenched in (modern interpretations) of these religions and pretty broadly followed by its mainstream believers.
My very limited and by-now-rather-biased knowledge of Islam*, however, is limited to its unequal attitudes towards women, its hatred of gays, its acceptance of Muhammad’s rape and slavery of children, its encouragement of the killing of apostates, etc.
I understand that it encourages good treatment of people in its “in-groups”, meaning other Muslims, parents and children, other Abrahamic believers, etc.
Does it have humanitarian kindnesses and moral guidance that extends beyond that in its scriptures, meaning not because it adopted them from a modern host country?
Inclusion. Islam is not racist. There’s more diversity at the Hajj than in downtown Austin…by far.
Learning. Islam is deeply respectful of science, art, and literature. Muslims adore poetry; the Arabic language, especially, is almost tailor-made for poetry.
I speak neither Arabic nor Persian, but I was under the impression that Persian poetry destroys Arabic poetry every damn day of the week, and twice on Friday.
(I started studying Italian to read Dante in the original, and didn’t complete the course. Arabic and Persian would be much tougher: a whole new alphabet, just to start!)
I’d venture to say that the language fits one type of poetry. After all, any language can be poetic; it’s all in the user’s gift, if you will, for how said user employs the language.
Poetry, it seems to me, is that expression of language least amenable to translation.
Put differently, how could anyone who is not fluent in both languages possibly form an informed opinion? For that matter, even an informed opinion is still a subjetive judgment.