Yes, like the leader of a state issuing a directive…
but of course it is impossible to make the difference is it not between the opinion of the religious teacher in the 90% of the MENA for which there is no legal status of the fatwa and the unique case of the Shia theocracy of the Iran which has the unique situation of a formal priesthood…
But it is all the muslim horde, no? No differences can be made
so I should of course be unable to make the difference between the american preachers making religious opinions in the Uganda promoting the killing of the gay men and the other american religious figures… all american christians, obviously no differences.
I’m not sure it really matters if a fatwa lacks force of law, if it has force of force, i.e. governmental sanction for individuals to commits acts of violence.
Of course, not all fatwa carry this sanction. The famous ones do, though.
The funny thing is that even if it were all “private money”, the idea that it would not have been sanctioned by the Saudi Government is laughable. This is an absolute monarchy we are talking about here, not some jewel of Arab democracy in the desert.
From the wikipedia article on the Saudi Arabian legal system:
*The primary source of law is the Islamic Sharia derived from the teachings of the Qu’ran and the Sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet).[92] Saudi Arabia is unique among modern Muslim states in that Sharia is not codified and there is no system of judicial precedent, giving judges the power to use independent legal reasoning to make a decision. Saudi judges tend to follow the principles of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence (or fiqh) found in pre-modern texts[146] and noted for its literalist interpretation of the Qu’ran and hadith.[147] Because the judge is empowered to disregard previous judgments (either his own or of other judges) and may apply his personal interpretation of Sharia to any particular case, divergent judgements arise even in apparently identical cases,[148] making predictability of legal interpretation difficult.[149] The Sharia court system constitutes the basic judiciary of Saudi Arabia and its judges (qadi) and lawyers form part of the ulema, the country’s Islamic scholars.
<snip>
Saudi justice has been criticized for “ultra-puritanical judges”, being often harsh, (with beheading for the crime of witchcraft), but sometimes lenient, (for cases of rape or wife-beating), and slow, for example leaving thousands of abandoned women unable to secure a divorce.[155][156] In 2007, King Abdullah issued royal decrees reforming the judiciary and creating a new court system,[148] and, in 2009, the King made a number of significant changes to the judiciary’s personnel at the most senior level by bringing in a younger generation.[153]
*
Remarkably similar to the US and other western countries!!
So I see your answer is “No I actually do not have any citation for school financing in the Middle East, but I will quote an American politican making assertions about countries not in the middle east”
Of course your speculation about what private Saudi money can do is … typically american in its understanding, and very ignorant of the actual operations of the system.
Democracy has not one thing to do with how the Saud deal with the religious money donations or indeed with the religious establishment…
It is a Wonderful straw man Mace, you continue to pile on to things not said by Monty at all about the comparison. Not one word did he write about the Legal System.
Of course this continues the typical ignorant idiiocy of the MENA = the Saudi Arabia as of course the Saudi legal system is not at all like the rest of the region.
But please do continue to build up the mountains of Straw Men.
No perhaps I am refering to your Oklahoma bomber or maybe to the mass killers motivated by the white supramacist ideologies preached in a certain type of church…
Of course it is funny this gross ignorant bigotry that says Muslim = Osama Bin Laden.
Of course it is worth the while to point out how doubly stupid this is because the Osama bin Laden was no kind of religious leader in any of the ordinary senses but the leader of a organization of terror war, an army in a way. It is his engineering planning and not any imagined religious opinion that led to the crime of the world trade center attacks.
Personally, I’m confident I can’t be called ignorant of or bigoted against Islam because I hold all religions in disdain.
Granted, my degrees of disdain vary somewhat.
Holdbrooke isn’t “a politician”. But choosing between Richard Holbrooke and some anonymous poster on a MB is not a difficult choice at all. He’s got a resume a mile long, and you have… anger and condescension.
You have too narrow a view of what the word politics means.
The Washington Post says yes and no. OBL was not the leader of a religious sect, but he was religious, and used religion in his exhortations. He issued fatwahs, which other religious leaders too the effort to rebut. He appeared, at least, to hold himself competent to make religious pronouncements and declarations, including decrees to commit murder.
The Post’s nuance is admirable, as is President Obama’s efforts to separate anti-terrorist efforts from any appearance of an anti-Islamic crusade. This is a distinction that many on the right refuse to accept, holding that the struggle against terrorism is identical to a struggle against all Islam.
In the same way, I think you err, and go a little too far, in trying to claim that OBL was “…No kind of religious leader in any of the ordinary senses.” He presented himself as one, and that is sometimes the only determinant we have. In Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, anyone who says he is a religious leader can be taken as one.
(Anyone can purchase a Doctorate of Divinity from the Universal Life Church. Of course, they can also become a Jedi Knight the same way.)
Yesterday, a government official issued a statement stating “Public officials are ministers of God assigned the duty of punishing the wicked and protecting the righteous.” Who did this government official work for?
A) the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Saudi Arabia
B) the Revolutionary Courts of the Council of Guardians in Iran
C) a shari’ah court licensed by the Ministry of Justice in Egypt
D) the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama
“My side doesn’t do this kind of thing” is not, and has never been, my argument.
My argument has always been “The intermixture of religion and politics is not something only limited to Islam or something only Muslim countries have to deal with. Christianists and Islamists are cut from exactly the same kind of cloth, and the only thing that separates one from the other is the particulars of the religion they follow”.
