The largest Muslim country in the world has had a woman president, has a holiday that commemorates a woman, has a number of powerful female business leaders, and actually had such a pro-birth control policy that back in the 1970s they celebrated family planning on one of their coins.
It’s not a women’s rights paradise, to be sure. But do “women have anything like equal rights?” Hell, yes. The fact you don’t know this suggests you really don’t have the knowledge you should have before you start a thread like this one.
I’m not a big fan of Islam, myself, but that goes for all religions. And in years of living in large Muslim countries, I can assure you that individual Muslims behave no better or worse than individual Christians.
Sure, but what’s the point in using that standard? I could pick hundreds of arbitrary ways to group people, find the subgroup in each one that is doing horrible things, and decide that I hate the whole group. If the religion isn’t teaching anything any different from any other number of religions, and most of its followers are perfectly good people, then clearly the problem isn’t with the religion.
1% of the US population is Muslim, yet your lifetime odds of being killed by a terrorist are equivalent to being killed by a shark. Most of the United States is not on the ocean.
The threat and horror of Islamic terrorism is almost entirely a product of Hollywood and news reporting.
Granted, there are Islamic terrorist groups, around the world, who are a legitimate threat to the stability and safety of some particular nations. But there have also been Communist groups and Sikhist groups and separatist groups who have been hiding out in the jungle, raiding and murdering whole towns, in nations spanning the world for my whole life. The leading connection between them was that the official government was little better. People who live in a country that sucks often try to find an alternative that will be better - and then are just as bad.
Followers of Islam have gone on crazy rampages, shooting up crowds and workspaces. So have Christians, Batman fans, and Communists. The leading connection between these was mental illness. People who are crazy enough to want to go out killing are good at finding an excuse to do so.
The Islamic Golden Age kicked off the Renaissance. While Turkey might be heading backwards, now, until 3 years ago it was what your average Muslim-majority country probably would have looked like if it wasn’t for Saudi Arabian funding of Fundamentalist thought. It was just a country, basically indistinguishable from places like Hungary, Austria, Greece, Spain, etc. If there hadn’t been oil under the Middle East, the whole region would just be a bunch of agrarian and heavily middle-class, vaguely uninteresting countries.
I recommend reading more research on prevailing attitudes among Muslims themselves for ideals such as Sharia applying to all citizens before you decide it’s just the leadership using Islam to control a population. Support for Sharia as the law of the land is deep among most Muslim nations; indeed it falls under 50% of the population in a few small nations in southern/eastern Europe and central Asia; collectively those nations only represent a small amount of the total Muslim population in the world.
Certainly there are free thinkers among any of these populations, and with Iran in particular there is no question in my mind that central control drives much of the actual execution of Islamic-based ideals for governance. Still, that control would not be possible were the populace not also generally driven by an alliance with conservative Islamic ideals that are antithetical to western democracy.
The problem isn’t any particular religion, the problem is the combination of religion and power. Christianity would be absolutely no different than Islam if we let them. I don’t like that Islam has as much power as it does over so many people, but their hate is no different than any other religions.
This is my perspective, as well. I’m not too concerned what people believe, even if it is silly supernatural stuff like Islam or Christianity; but it is scary when people who subscribe to such nuttiness gain the power to impose their beliefs upon others. I’m a big fan of “Enlightenment values” and the separation of church and state, and I fear that these thing are currently being eroded in the USA. If we don’t watch out, we will wind up like the stereotypical “Islamic Theocracy”.
Add up the sum total of scientific contribution from Islamic societies compared to western societies and you will see the barren wasteland. And that was literally a thousand years ago, what’s happened since then?
I’m hesitant to say christian world because that implies that christianity had something to do with the scientific advances, but I do think we can at least credit the christian majority for not standing in the way or discouraging this kind of inquiry on the same scales as Islamic civilizations for the past thousand years.
I remember hearing a faction in the Islamic world was set against such inquiry and wanted to adhere to more literal Quranic views, and they won out.
Before reading this thread I was of the opinion that Islam was perhaps a thousand years behind the Judaeo-Christian world in humanistic development. Now I’m thinking that pendulums swing, and the more things change the more they remain the same.
It would have been nice if the Islamic world had experienced the “Age of Enlightenment” '“Age of Reason” along with Western Europe and America. Of course, Christianity itself had little to do with the advances, and often set itself against the new ideas…
I assume you refer to Pakistan? Do women have the legal right to divorce on the same grounds as men? Do women have the legal right to own property in their own right? Are women treated equally under the law respecting sexual assault? Final question: where these legal rights exist, are they honored in the countryside as much as in the cities?
I disagree with your suggestion that anyone needs to be more educated to make an OP such as I did, especially since part of what I asked for was to be persuaded by facts that I was wrong.
Finally, again referring to my OP, I am not talking about individual Muslims, I am referring to a religion and its institutions.
This seems, to me, to have little or nothing to do with women’s rights on a day to day basis. See my questions to Cairo Carol above. If you are suggesting that women’s rights are better protected in those countries than in the US, I respectfully suggest that you are wrong.
I’m not married to the idea that there needs to be any central body, but I was struggling with some mechanism to enable changes in Islamic religious doctrine that seem to me to be necessary. Doctrinal respect for other views, doctrinal respect for human rights and women’s rights, doctrinal elimination of the death penalty for apostasy, would be some areas I would like to see changed.
By the way, I will be among the first to agree that the US has, at least in the past, ruthlessly disrupted sometimes-liberal democratic governments among Muslim nations either through fear of communism or lust for oil, with almost universally disastrous effect. I would be happy to discuss what can be done now to remedy those past horrible mistakes. That might be better in another thread.
I have seen your participation in other threads about Islam and I am interested to see the positive things you may have to bring to the discussion.
All religions are dumb. Some are dumber than others. But you can’t, nor should you, stop people being dumb by force, it’s a basic human right. You can try to educate them out of their dumbness, which is the goal of the Straight Dope after all, but it’s probably a futile exercise. And anyway, extinguish one religion ten will pop up in its place Hydra-like. Religion, like the poor (to borrow from one religious leader), will always be with us.
No, I don’t like Islam either, but I don’t dislike it any more than other organized superstitions. I say just let them all get on with it unless they’re actually bothering the saner part of mankind. Then they need a sharp reminder that they can do what the hell they like among themselves but attempting to impose their lunacies on others will not be tolerated.
Feel free to answer the same questions about Indonesia, if you can. And it is my contention that, to the extent that ordinary women’s rights are recognized in a country such as Indonesia is the extent to which Islam does not have political power, and vice versa.
I disagree with this. If (for example) women are subject to oppression in a country it is in everyone’s interest to address that, whether the oppression comes from Islam or some other religion, or whether it is some other patriarchal power structure. How it is addressed is, of course the difficult point. This is why it would be nice in the case of Islam if there were some central body which could be persuaded to make changes in received doctrine.