From what I could tell from looking into it, there are roughly 53 nations I could find in Africa. Of those, about 33 are christian majority, 19 muslim majority, and 1 that is split. That is probably a roughly fair assessment of the situation. Madagascar is technically not christian majority as tribal religions make up about half, but christianity makes up 41% so I counted it as christian.
33 christian nations
7 free
12 partly free
14 not free
19 muslim nations
2 free
7 partly free
10 not free
So Christian majority nations in Africa are more likely to be rated Free by freedom house, less likely to be rated not free compared to muslim majority nations.
I think my data is mostly accurate. As to the reasons, I’m not sure but the fact that christianity has undergone a reformation and enlightenment while islam has not could play a role. Islands are more likely to be christian, I’m not sure if that plays a role vs landlocked nations.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28, ESV)
And Galatians is one of the earlier books, actually written by Paul.
Don’t get me wrong–I agree with your point. There are other verses that definitely do treat women as inferior. And this verse was largely ignored in favor of those.
But I want this verse to be known, as well. It’s the one I pull out any time “Christians” claim that bigotry is okay.
The problem with this thread is quite simple. There is no reason to consolidate and isolate Islam like this. There is no reason we can’t just call things like misogyny wrong without pulling the entire religion along for the ride.
The fact is that Islam can exist without misogyny. We already see it in here in the U.S. So it cannot be the religion that is the problem, and thus disliking the religion makes no sense. Clearly, it is not the religion that creates that issue, but the culture. Fix the culture, and we don’t need to do anything to the religion.
And, yes, this holds for people who hate Christians. Yes, I hate homophobia, misogyny, racism, etc. But, because there is a version of Christianity that condemns all these things, I can’t dislike Christianity. Inherently, doing so would make me bigoted towards the religion, as I am grouping the bad with the good.
It’s the same reason why saying “black people are thieves” is wrong. Yes, some are. But it’s wrong to tar the entire race because of some. Same with Islam.
You want to fight misogyny in Islam? Find the scriptures that allow you to do so, as we have done with Christianity.
What makes you so sure Islamic civilizations were standing in the way of scientific inquiry? The Islamic Golden Age was ended by the Mongols utterly laying waste to the region, not some decline in interest in science. Iraq went from 30 million inhabitants in 800 AD to 5 million in the 1900s. From there, the area was passed between empires, with most countries only achieving independence after World War II.
None of that is conducive to being on the forefront of scientific achievement.
Seems I missed Gambia while zoomed out ( stupid riverine country ). I also ignored non-mainland countries, but I’ll admit that is an arguable bias. By the way one of the ones I assume you are counting is Mauritius, which just so you know is majority Hindu, not Christian. So if that is one of your seven, scratch it from the list. Like Benin it stands out as an outlier.
I still contend even with your amended numbers that IMHO there isn’t a pattern worth mentioning. Minority free, majority unfree with two of the six ( if I’m counting correctly ) free Christian countries being tiny island nations with a combined population well under a million.
If we’re going to draw an entirely unsound conclusion from this data I prefer the one that says multi-confessional, non-Abrahamic majority countries like Benin and Mauritius are the best at 2-0 free ;).
I really like this post, even though I disagree with several parts of it. In order, then:
1st paragraph: true enough, can’t really argue. Misogyny wasn’t the only thing by far, but it does seem to be less central than some other tenets. I’m not sure, however, what other “things like” misogyny might be that aren’t central to Islamic belief.
2nd paragraph: what culture specifically? I think you would have to cover more than one culture to account for the cases where Islam intersects with misogyny. I have referred to tribalism in this thread, and to me that term refers to a level of cultural development rather than to specific cultures. Tribalism is relative, of course, you find it all the time in modern American politics, but it’s worst when there are no counter-influences.
3rd paragraph: I’m not sure what you mean by “version of Christianity.” Do you mean the way that some individual people practice it, vs. referring to a particular sect that is positively against misogyny? If so, would you say those individual practitioners are going against the norm of practicing Christians? Because in the case of Islam, what I have seen is that individual practitioners who respect women’s rights would be going against the norm of practicing Muslims (“norm” meaning statistically dominant).
4th paragraph: I disagree strongly with this parallel. I have said that I dislike religions in general but Islam particularly, and that it is certain specific doctrinal positions that I find objectionable. I am specifically not saying that everything about the religion is bad, and I am definitely not saying anything at all about Muslims as a group.
You might find this an interesting read, I remember Irshad Manji going into some of this but this is a good primer.
It talks about the closing of the gates of ijtihad. I think that had more to do with the path of modern Islam than anything else. And look at where the most strident forms of Islam like wahabbism grew out of, the most restrictive early variants of Islam.
Wellllll…see, this post kinda illustrates some of the difficulties of terminology and coming to grips with foreign cultures, ideologies and theologies.
Who are some of the biggest advocates of the notion that the ‘gates of ijtihad’ are not closed? The Wahhabis ;). Another big advocate? Ruhollah Khomeini. Also see salafists in general. It is not necessarily a progressive notion ( though it can be ).
This why terms like Islamic fundamentalism ( which I’ve surely used myself out of convenience ) can confuse the issue. Fundamentalist as a Protestant term doesn’t necessarily translate all that well to Islam. Wahhabism is a young, radical sect - they aren’t conservatives theologically, they are 18th century innovators who rejected what they regarded then as the staid old establishment. Their theological hero died in prison, condemned by some in the establishment of the time as a Muslim heretic. Don’t make the mistake of assuming folks like the Wahhabis are following Islam as it was originally or supposed to be practiced, just because THEY say so.
Similarly with Khomeini - the old man was a radical revolutionary, not a hidebound traditionalist. He did not represent a vision of medieval Twelver Shi’ism at all.
In my reading, Paul is saying that everyone is equally able to find God’s blessing. That doesn’t really lock anything down. The owner of a slave plantation could get out in front of his family, his paid workers, and all of his slaves and make a proclamation, “All of you have the chance to find favor with me!” I generally wouldn’t take that to be a statement that they’re all social equals. Just that, literally, there is some path by which each individual can please the head honcho. And, likely, that path will involve keeping within the bounds of their place in society.
I would want to see further evidence than that single, rather ambiguous statement before feeling like there was a clear statement of gender (or class) equality on Earth.
This isn’t directed at just you, but your post does bring something to mind. Why is it so many people are quite comfortable with a non-literal (“In my reading…”) of the Bible; however, they insist on a completely literal reading of the Qur’an? Of course the fun part of that is many (if not most) who insist on that when they condemn the Qur’an, Islam, or Muslims is that they don’t know Arabic so are insisting on a literal rendition in a different language. Come to think of it, I know more than a few people who insist on the same for the KJV.
As Kimstu pointed out, the largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia. In Indonesia, women have the same right to divorce as men, and they can own property the same as men. I’m not deeply familiar with sexual assault law or differences in treatment of legal rights in the countryside versus major cities, but I AM familiar with critiques of the justice system, and while there are many well-documented problems, this isn’t one I’ve heard about.
You ask “to be persuaded by facts that [you] were wrong,” but the minute someone presents those facts you say they aren’t important. If no Muslim-majority country in the world had ever had a female head of state, I have a funny feeling you would count that as acceptable evidence against Islam. Since it isn’t true, however, suddenly it doesn’t count.
Probably because as natives of western majority-Christian societies, they’re far more familiar with the various cultural and literary roles of the Bible. They’ve seen the Bible quoted by many different writers and speakers, historical and modern, to make many different points, and they’re aware of how different believers have interpreted it differently.
Most of those people, however, have absolutely zero familiarity with the Qur’an or its cultural/literary contexts until they’re prompted to seek it out by controversies about what it allegedly “requires” Muslims to do or believe. Without any such context, they simply don’t see how the excerpts they quote can possibly be interpreted in any other way than what seems to them the “plain” and “obvious” meaning.
Someone with no familiarity with the Bible might well have similar difficulty in understanding how Matthew 19:21 could possibly be taken to mean anything other than “if you as a follower of Jesus want to do the right thing, you have to sell everything you’ve got and donate it to the poor”. This literalist interpretation would be, to say the least, highly inconvenient for Christians in general to adopt. So we’ve got a millennia-old interpretative tradition to provide alternatives to taking it literally.
The same sorts of long and complex interpretative traditions exist for the Qur’an as well; it’s just that most of the non-Muslim “Qur’anic literalists” know nothing about themt.
I prefaced it with “In my reading” since my reading is generally a literal reading, and that’s not the usual one. I do hold the Bible to be a work worthy of condemnation in many parts, and in the parts where it is not to be a fairly poor work of philosophy which has been improved on significantly in later millenia.
I haven’t read the Koran, but I have read the Thousand and One Nights - which was written in pre-Wahhabist Arabia - and I’ve read things like the Arthurian Tales (Christian Medieval Ages), Homer’s Odyssey (Ancient Greek), etc. and I think these are probably better indications of what the predominant culture was in those places based on their religion - before those religions were supplanted by revisionist variants or replaced by modern philosophies of basic human rights. From that, I have to admit that the Thousand and One Nights are actively and completely reprehensible in all ways. The stories are, one after the other, tales of horrible greed, misogyny, cruelty, and savagery and yet that’s what the heroes of the story are doing.
This isn’t to say that Greek heroes and Arthurian heroes didn’t go around raping women and stealing goods. But the level at which this sort of thing occurs is sufficiently rare and glossed over that one can still read it without too much agony.
So while I have not read the Koran, I do feel like it is probably worse than the Bible and that a literal reading is probably, on the whole, scarier. But, it’s still true that most of the Middle East probably would have been more like Turkey than like Afghanistan, had there been no oil in the region. Regardless of what the Koran says and regardless of what the Bible says, human ability to rationalize their current culture in comparison to their religious texts seems to be infinite. These works were written long enough ago that modern sensibilities should have taken precedence. It’s just a quirk of fate, less than a hundred years ago, that span things off into a bad direction. And even accepting that, most Muslims are still no worse than most Christians and certainly a lower threat to you than even your average shark.
Anyways, I would wonder whether the Koran is perhaps more ‘consistent’ than the Bible. As I noted, if you look at even just the Gospels, you can get Jesus advocating the sword and decrying the sword, endorsing the law and dismissing the law. From start to finish, the Bible is a study in self-contradictions. So even though you can point out horrible things in it, it is somewhat unfair to do so since it also tempers/contradicts that in other places.
If the Koran was simply more consistent in its intent, that might make it a ‘worse’ version even if it doesn’t really add anything worse to what all it advocates.
I’m skeptical of an essay that speaks of “centuries of intellectual and political decline” in the Muslim world, without mentioning that it was conquered by the Mongols during that time.
More than that, though, we’ve gone from talking about scientific achievements (which continued in the Muslim world until the Mongols wrecked everything), to religious law. The connection seems tenuous, at best. English (and thus American) tort law, for instance, hardly changed from the middle ages until the mid-19th century, yet there was plenty of scientific discovery during that time.
No, you are mistaken about my approach. I was wrong about which country you were referring to, but I didn’t say that wasn’t important. What I said, which you didn’t specifically respond to (it wasn’t directed at you but it was a result of your post), was that “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.” If Indonesia’s government is largely or mostly secular, this would support my contention; if not, that would tend to prove me wrong about this point. I hope the government is secular, not because it supports my point but because it would make it a good example of a majority-Muslim country where the law is not derived from a holy book.
By the way, it may be a faint hope, but I would prefer if we could have this discussion without supposing what I would say “if.” If you will do that for me, I will do that for you. Actually, I will do that for you anyway.
Colossians 3:22
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
My answer to this is two-fold: of lesser importance, do you really expect anyone who wishes to comment on the contents of the Quran to learn to read Arabic? I believe Quran study can occupy people for whom Arabic is their native language for their entire lives. Are they the only ones allowed to comment?
Of more importance, I don’t insist on a literal reading myself, what concerns me is the people who do, and who use that literal interpretation of cherry-picked passages to justify anti-social violence. Of course that happens with any religion’s holy writings. However, it seems nearly impossible for non-extreme Muslims to say “there’s a lot of stuff in there that doesn’t apply to our lives and that we don’t follow any more.” They may live that way, they may even think that way, but to say it out loud would, I think, be dangerous. This gives extreme weight to the defense of anti-social violence based on it being supported by passages in the Quran or commentaries. In modern Christianity, at least, it is not dangerous to criticize Old Testament strictures against mixing two kinds of cloth and the extreme penalty for doing so (just as an example); or New Testament strictures such as those quoted by Chief Pedant above.
This seems to lead to a popular question: is Muslim extremism worse or more dangerous than extremism in other religions? We have certainly seen violent extremist acts in recent years by Hindus and Buddhists, among others. I conclude that the difference is less one of substance as it is one of scope. That is, Muslim extremism seems more visible because of the number of countries affected by it, which may be a measure of the large percentage of the world population that identifies as Muslim. It also seems more visible to us as Americans because other Americans are so exercised by it.
Do not propose to hold someone against the measure of the law, when you yourself can not hold your self to it.
“he who is without sin, cast the first stone”
He did not say Hey don’t do this.
he said Hey, which whoever of you has actually held them selves to the measure of the law and kept them self blameless and has not done unknown things just as bad or worse than this lady, you make the call, you throw the first stone.
You want to spout the law, you want to enforce the law, but you dont follow or abide the law yourselves, perhaps you should tend to yourself and clean up your own back yard first.
At least that’s what i get out of it, i don’t see a guy saying he we don’t do this anymore, i’m changing the rules.
I see a guy saying hey, you don’t follow the rules any more, you’re no longer capable of trying to enforce them because you are just as bad as the accused.
It appears that you are now seeking evidence that will permit you to claim that Indonesia, with it’s pretty good (not perfect) record of respecting women doesn’t count as a Muslim country. Okay, I’ll play. But I need to know up front what the goal posts are, so they don’t move again. Define for me what criteria you would apply to determine the extent to which Islam has political power in a country? Is it only if there is Sharia? (By that definition, no, Indonesia is not a Muslim country.) Or do you have other standards?
Kirchberg v. Feenstra, a SCOTUS case in which the Court held a Louisiana Head and Master law, which gave sole control of marital property to the husband, unconstitutional in 1981
Barring women from practicing law was prohibited in the U.S. in 1971.
The Supreme Court ruled for the first time in Reed v. Reed that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited differential treatment based on sex in 1971.
California was the first U.S. state to pass a no-fault divorce law - 1970
An amendment to the Cable Act allowed females to retain their citizenship even if they married an Asian - 1931
Previously, a woman lost her United States citizenship if she married a foreign man, since she assumed the citizenship of her husband, a law that did not apply to United States citizen men who married foreign women, unless they married an Asian - 1922
As of 1887, one-third of the states had not provided statutory protection for a married women to control her earnings. Three states gave married women no legal status until late in the nineteenth century: Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia.
So what you are saying is that because in less than 3% of the time from when Muhammad was born, or ~2% from when Jesus may have been around (don’t know exact years) that the problem is Islam? Heck if it wasn’t for the supreme court most of these rights wouldn’t exist in this country.