In this very thread, actually.
Do of her what you would do of anyone else. She says she is a young British scientist of Indian heritage who practices a historically liberal form of Shi’a Islam. I see no reason to doubt her.
It’s an interesting thing to consider, severus
How about this:
The *Malisious * are living peacefully between the non-Malisious and Muslims, until the Muslims decide to murder another non-Muslim.
Which side will the Malisious take?
Will they stand by the non-Muslims, or will they take sides with their original religion?
[Oh, once again: I’m not afraid of Muslims, you know. Merely pissed off at them] 
Yes and so did Zarcowardly:
** “We have declared a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it,” said the speaker in the 35-minute message.
“Democracy is also based on the right to choose your religion,” he said, and that is “against the rule of God.”
**
So while the Iraqis risked death to vote you’re making fun of the President who made that possible. We have soldiers in the field that are willing to carry this out. All they need is a little support.
But as the debate thread suggests, maybe there’s a way to surrender. I’ve narrowed the PR campaign down to billboards with only 2 words:
Got Islam?
Big whoop. Tell the women being forced into burkas or hiding from the Islamic fanatics how much more free they are. Tell the dead Iraqi gays how much better their life is. Tell it to the Iraqis who have lost friends and family to our violence or the religious and political violence we’ve unleashed.
Bush is a monster who deserves nothing but hate. He has never done anything but inflict misery and pain and death and disaster on the world. He is a man who completely lacks redeeming qualities; vileness and stupidity incarnate.
There, is that better than making fun of him ?
Rapists, torturers and murderers. I have no desire to support them in any way.
Well, Iraq does, thanks to us. We’ve certainly done a good job of destroying secularism and moderation in the ME. The Islamofundies have no better allies than us.
Good point. Actually, at the beginning of the second century AH, they made a basic rule that if someone says they’re Muslim you’re not allowed to call them a non-Muslim. No calling each other “infidel” is allowed. There was a destabilizing movement in the first century called the Khawarij. They held the doctrine that anyone who committed a sin became an infidel. They assassinated the fourth caliph ‘Ali (his sin was that he pissed them off) and started civil warfare. After they were defeated militarily, the theologians decided that if people were allowed to call one another infidel, the whole society would fragment.
From al-Fiqh al-akbar by Abu Hanifah.
The only major group since then that rejects this rule is Wahhabism. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab taught that any Muslims who didn’t subscribe to his ultra-strict interpretation of Islam were infidels and should be killed. He got this idea from Ibn Taymiyah who declared the Mongol rulers of 14th-century Syria to be infidels, even though they were Muslim, so they should be fought. For four centuries after that no one followed Ibn Taymiyah’s example or thought the particular situational ruling against the Mongols could be generalized in any way.
But now Wahhabis believe that anyone who isn’t a Wahhabi is an infidel and should be fought. When Wahhabism started attacking Ottoman-held parts of Arabia in the 18th century, Europeans cheered them on. When mujahidin fought the Soviets, America armed Wahhabis (like Usamah bin Ladin) to do their dirty work.
Until now, the only ones who ever insisted that non-Wahhabis, e.g. someone like severus described, are infidels were the Wahhabis themselves. Now they have helpers here insisting that only Wahhabism is the “real” Islam. Dudes. Before giving Wahhabis any more ammo, you might wanna rethink that… This is like “do not feed the troll” except that Wahhabi trolls play for keeps.
And that concludes our tour of Der Trihs’ world tour of hatred.
Coming from someone who’s inciting religious hatred that’s an amusing accusation, Mr Islam-is-the-Only-Violent-Religion.
Well to incite religious hatred I would have to suggest something along those lines. Care to remove foot from mouth?
Well, they value religious freedom and tolerance as much as I do, so they won’t stand for any crimes committed in the name of religion, of course.
Are you sure? Because reading your posts, I get the distinct impression that you dread the time when Muslims will take over your country and impose a medieval interpretation of their religion on it. Which I’m willing to bet is never going to happen.
Look, gum, the purpose of my previous post was that, while I do agree that there has been a radicalization of Islam in some parts of the world, and that it does present a problem that we should address, many people exaggerate this problem, and in some cases, they don’t even know what the problem really is. Frankly, at the risk of offending someone, when I look at Islam without any of my cultural conditioning coming into play, I see a religion that is quite similar to Christianity. Both are Middle-Eastern monotheistic religions that evolved from Judaism, but who instead of attaching themselves to a single culture, as Judaism and other previous religions had done, became universal faiths. Faiths that claim to be for anyone. This is why these two religions became so big and were a factor in so much of Western life for the past centuries: war, exploration, both the good and the bad.
Today, though, Christianity has been able to reach above its expansionist and violent past. This tendency is still seen in many Christians today, but as a whole, Christianity is less concerned with expansion. Plus, with the development of liberal thought in predominantly Christian countries, Christians have come to accept religious pluralism and progressive ideas such as the equality of the sexes. Some will say that the next step is the progressive disparition of Christianity, which we can see in the fact that many previously mainly Christian countries are becoming more and more secular. I’m not so sure about that.
Islam is going through this same evolution. There is absolutely nothing that says it can’t, and no amount of Qur’anic passages you may quote will convince me otherwise. In the same way that Christians have dropped the most embarrassing passages from their Bible, Muslims have started dropping the most embarrassing passages from their Qur’an. Maybe some day this will lead to the disparition of Islam, in the same way as some talk about the disparition of Chritianity. I can see someone like Der Trihs say that belief is inherently flawed and as society evolves, all religions will disappear. Let’s just say I disagree with him.
This said, mainly Christian countries and mainly Islamic countries haven’t gone through the same history. This, I think, is the reason why today there is such a difference between “Christianity” and “Islam”. The reason isn’t theological, it’s political. I can’t say why there aren’t many Islamic democracies today – although there are a few. But in any case, democracy is a recent development anyway. And there are true pressures in favour of democracy in many Muslim countries today. Pressures that are made by Muslims. As well, I don’t know why many mainly Muslim countries are still so poor today. I guess I could study their history and try comparing it with the history of Christian Europe to see what the differences were. But I’m willing to bet that these differences wouldn’t be due to the fact that some countries were Christian and other Islamic.
In other words, most of the problems the world has today are political problems, not religious. This said, religion is a strong force that binds people together, and often easy to exploit. As the pro-gun people would say, “religions don’t kill people, people kill people. And sometimes they play on religion, or race, or ethnicity, to build a us vs. them feeling in others”.
Oh, and interesting post, Johanna.
Cecil already partly answered the question here. Yes, democracy is a recent development, and there are lots of complicating, interplaying factors why some countries got it earlier, and some still have problems today.
Yes, Religion (like ethnicity) makes a handy, ready-made tool for popularists to exploit, but that doesn’t make it the reason. Popularists will always find a handle to jerk people around with, so the best long-term solution isn’t conversion, but education of the population, so fewer will follow the Pied piper blindly.
For the USA, here you go : Al Fatiha
In France, the most well known Islamic cleric who supports gay rights is the mufti Salem Bencheickh. It’s not like his interpretation of Islam teachings re homosexuality is mainstream, but say, catholic bishops, supporting the same agenda aren’t very common, either… Plus he has been elected to the French Representative Council of Muslim Faith, so he must have some support amongst french muslims…
As an aside, I discovered the other day that, quite surprinsingly, sex-reassignement surgery is legal in Iran, following a jurisprudence established by Khomeiny.
True, and when al-Fatiha got the news of this, there was much wonderment and rejoicing. I read that Iran does more genital reassignment surgeries per capita than any other country in the world. However, a closer look reveals not such a pretty picture. The motivation for surgery seems to be aimed at making gay people straight.
There was an article by Afsaneh Najmabadi in The Iranian (no longer online, sorry), critiquing this from a gay-rights perspective.
This is not exactly the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care. As a transsexual who is struggling for LGBT rights, no way will I endorse such a homophobic use of our situation. That isn’t what transsexualism is all about. As a lesbian, I’m deeply offended. If I were in Iran, there would be pressure on me to marry a guy. I don’t want that! But even in America 40 years ago, MTF lesbians were excluded from transition… it used to be trans dykes got guys to pretend to date them so the gatekeepers would let them transition. Iran is still behind the times.
To be honest, I’m not very brave and I’m not in much danger. I live in Manila, Philippines and I’ve left Mindanao. Both my parents are still Muslim but are very open minded.
If you want to learn more about the dangers of Mohammad’s Islam. Check out www.faithfreedom.org
Although if you do bother to expand your focus to other groups, the question becomes more interesting. For example, there’s the IRA, which (to my limited knowledge) has effectively closed up shop. To call the situations in Ireland and the Middle East “disparate” would be a bit of an understatement, but it’s still heartening to know that sometimes the terrorists just figure out that it’s more effective to become politicians.
[/QUOTE]
]i think you`ll find that the i.r.a. have not "become politicians " but are in fact making stupendous amounts of money from organised crime ,especially drug smuggling !with the irish government helpfully turning a blind eye to their activities after all its for the cause ! and anyway its not their problem as the drugs are going to g.b. and western europe ,and i suspect that the bribes some leading irish politicians and civil servants are receiving aren`t exactly impeding things (though we`re not supposed to know about that lol ! )taminy hall writ large !All right, so there are one or two web sites and a couple of organizations in the US whose members seem awfully camera-shy. My question was not meant to imply that there are absolutely NO Muslim gay rights groups anywhere on the planet.
I have read Al Fatiha’s web site. Interestingly enough, there are few or no names or pictures. Did you know that organizers of gay Muslim organizations have a Fatwah against them decreeing that all “good” Muslims have an obligation to murder them?
By the way, I have also heard from another source that web sites like Al Fatha are not really by and for gay muslims, but are actually set up by Muslim conservatives to bait gay Muslims out of the closet and then bash them or kill them.
Allahu achbar, brother!
As of now my opinion of you, Valteron, can only be expressed in the Pit. But you really ought to shut the fuck up already before you spew any more ignorant idiocy like this. I work with al-Fatiha (my name’s on their site), they are for real, they are among the bravest people on the planet and the only lifeline to hope available to many queer Muslims around the world. Take back what you said about my peeps.
**Valteron[/b[,
Being an Israeli and a Jew, I think you may safely assume I am not an automatic Muslim defender. But even to me your views sound disturbingly similar to The Protocols of the Elders of Islam.
He said websites like al-Fatiha. He needs to back up his opinion regarding baiter websites. It’s certainly within the MO of terrorists to pose as one thing in order to trap someone. OBL did it to Ahmed Shah Masood (The “Lion of Panjshir"). If this is the case it is news that needs to get out to the public, not shouted down.