Haha, unfortunately, I have something even less marketable - a Master of Theological Studies.
Just out of curiosity, have you read or heard of the following books by John Bowen:
Can Islam Be French?: Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State
Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space
Thoughts appreciated.
Sorry, but I am not sure what you mean here. I didn’t write anything about tolerance. If you are trying to say that pre-modern Islamic states could somehow be characterized as secular, I disagree.
So besides the many misconceptions of the OP about Muslims in general, he’s also wrong if he thinks that moderate Muslims are apathetic to the extreme fringes of their religion.
Wellk, the OP certainly has some issues with the muslim faith. What he’s been less clear about is just what we are supposed to do about the Islam Problem.
So how about it, Stringbean? What’s the logical conclusion? How can we ensure our living space? Perhaps you have an idea for a Final Solution to this knotty issue? If you do, let’s hear it.
I would be interested in a more substantial refutation of Pew’s results if you’ve got it. Frankly I find them a little unbelievable and I’d be glad to learn that they’re massively exaggerated. But if sample size is the issue, sorry, I’m going with Pew before I go with internet person’s Indonesian friends.
Indeed. Just as there were some Christians who thought about how to live in a multi-faith society, there were some Muslims who thought the same thing. Muslim rulers, for a long time, were far better than Christian rulers at implementing a multi-faith society. Nobody implemented a secular society.
As for “death cult,” I borrow the idea from (I think) Thomas Friedman, who describes the suicide bombers and other terrorists as a death cult. Really, they’re excellent villains in the pulpiest of traditions, worshipping a dark god who wants them to bring death and terror to the land. However, this death cult is miniscule compared to Islam as a whole, and people who confuse the two coincidentally tend to be racist as all get-out.
There’s a lot of caveats to be added to the Pew polling.
First, the numbers are almost always misreported. The numbers about support for certain punishments are of those people who said Sharia law should be applied, which even in Egypt was only something like 70% of the entire adult population. So when people say 80% support such-and-such, they’re actually only talking about half the entire country.
Second, what makes public polling reliable is having multiple competing pollsters asking questions and using models that they refine over time in response to evidence. A pollster doing polling in many different countries and cultures, with no other evidence (like an election) to compare to, and without many other polls, is necessarily leaning very heavily on demographic assumptions and assumptions about survey design.
Third, polling about religion is especially problematic because respondents’ answers often don’t align with their actual beliefs or conduct. If you prime Catholics with a bunch of questions about sin and hell, and then ask them about abortion, birth control, or homosexuality, you get much more severe answers than the way they actually vote or conduct themselves. So there’s probably an element of that going on.
I think the take-away from the Pew polling is that a lot of Muslims (maybe a majority in a handful of countries, but a distinct minority in most of the 50-some Muslim countries) profess to believe in Seventh Century punishments for a range of crimes. It’s a troubling truth about the world, and a very legitimate criticism of Salafist and other ultra-conservative Islam.
But it would be a mistake to think these numbers are as reliable as, say, polls of adult voters in US elections. There’s a whole lot less opportunity for correcting the models with this kind of thing, and a whole lot more room for errors in cross-cultural polling about religious beliefs.
How many rubs does it take to deny honor killings are prescribed by Sharia law, which is a system of social governance based directly off Muslim text and tradition?
Funny you should bring that up, because there is one part of the world where many of the adherents of one particular religion still deny the Holocaust and where anti-semitism still abounds.
And you thought your snark was winning you points.
Now we’ve established that many Muslim communities don’t believe that Sharia law includes honor killings and it is not practiced. And we’ve also established that there are many non-Muslim communities that practice honor killings with no reference to Sharia law.
People are fucked up and are willing to do terrible things in the name of a higher purpose or calling. Many Muslims are willing to kill their own daughters in the name of a religion that prescribes that the shaming of family honor is a misdeed worthy of death.
I still don’t see why the religion bears no burden, and why I shouldn’t express my sincere outrage that this shit still goes in 2014. It is unacceptable, not from a Judeo-Christian holier-than-thou perspective, but from a humanist perspective. This shit is unacceptable, and that so many millions of sufficiently-educated Muslims don’t see that it is unacceptable speaks volumes of what their religion is teaching them.
Strange…I just checked my copy of Laleh Bakhtiar’s Encyclopedia of Islamic Law: A Compendium of the Major Schools, and can’t seem to find honor killings anywhere in it.
Honor killings are a violation of Sharia, which says that no one should be executed unless they are found guilty of a capital crime by a legitimate court.
I see why the religion bears no burden: the burden should be borne by the murderers. If you want to single out a particular strand of Islam for your ire, please do so: I’ll single out Identity Christianity for my ire, and particular forms of ultra-orthodox Judaism for my ire (hi, settlers!), and I’m certain I can track down some Hindus that still think Sati is acceptable and I can hate on them, and there are certainly some atheists who practice an especially terrible brand of atheism I can hate (and no, strident atheists, this atheist is not gonna engage you on whether it’s atheism to blame).
But when you act like Islam itself is the problem, you give cover to the murderers, cover they don’t deserve. They’re not normal people, their beliefs are not normal beliefs, they shouldn’t be able to hide behind your bigoted claims to the contrary.
